
Class. 
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE ANGLO-AMERICAN 
FUTURE 



THE ANGLO-AMERICAN 
FUTURE 



BY 

A. G. GARDINER 



^ 



New York 
THOMAS SELTZER 

1921 






Copyright, 1921, by 
THOMAS SELTZER, Inc. 



All rights resented 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



JUN -8 i92l 
'CI.A617242 



CONTENTS 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

CHAPTER 

I. THE NEW WORLD . 

II. A CENTURY OF PEACE 

III. THE TWO PEOPLES 

IV. THE AMERICAN MIND 
V. THE ENGLISH MANNER 

VI. POLITICAL DISCORDS . 
VII. SEA POWER 
VIII. THE FUTURE . 



9 
i6 

29 

45 

S6 

71 

87 

99 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Among the books that should be read in connection with 
Anglo-American relations in the past is Professor Dunning's 
Xfhe British Empire and the United States, George Louis 
^'^eer's The English-Speaking Peoples, Mr. H. S. Perris's 
A Short History of Anglo-American Relations, and Broug- 
ham Villiers and W. H. Chesson's Anglo-American Rela- 
tions 1861-1865. C. F. Adams's biography- of his father, 
who was American Minister in London during the Civil 
War, is essential to a just appreciation of the Anglo-Ameri- 
can situation in that critical time. Mr. Owen Wister's 
A Straight Deal, or The Ancient Grudge, is a breezy and 
generous attack by an American on the current anti-British 
feeling. [^Professor William E. Dodd's IVoodroiv Wilson: 
His Life and PFork contains much valuable matter bearing 
on the post-war aspects of the subject. On the question of 
a naval pact Mr. H. Sidebotham's ("A Student of War") 
article in the Neiv Republic and the accompanying leader 
in that journal deserve wide notice. 



THE ANGLO-AMERICAN 
FUTURE 

CHAPTER I 

THE NEW WORLD 

/ If the key to the puzzle of this distracted world 
can be said to rest in any single fact, it is to be 
found in the relations of the British Commonwealth 
and the American Commonwealth. The war has 
scrapped the European system, and with it the 
whole political mechanism of pre-war society. In 
that society Europe was alike the brain and the 
power-house. From the general current of the 
world's affairs, the American continent stood aloof 
by tradition and interest. It was self-contained and 
sufficient to itself. It would have no integral asso- 
ciation with European politics, nor would it permit 
Europe to acquire new sovereign rights in its own 
soil. The doctrine of isolation laid down by the 
Fathers of the United States Republic was in prin- 
ciple extended to the whole continent by President 
Monroe. It is pertinent to remind ourselves that 
in this extension English statesmanship played a 



lo THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

significant part which will be worth attention in a 
later connection. 

During the Civil War the Monroe doctrine was 
challenged by the ill-fated enterprise of Napoleon 
III in Mexico, and twice within recent memory it 
was brought into play in connection with the affairs 
of Venezuela. It was never accepted by the Con- 
tinental Imperialists, least of all by the last German 
Emperor, to whose dreams of German expansion 
in South America it offered an insuperable obstacle. 
As a policy it had obvious and inherent weaknesses, 
the chief of which was that its validity rested in the 
last resort less upon the power of the United States 
than upon the goodwill of the British Fleet. But 
for nearly a century it served as a bulwark of the 
policy of isolation, and under that policy America 
kept its hands off European affairs and the hands 
of Europe off its own affairs. 

It was the more disposed to confirm itself in the 
doctrine of isolation because its own abundant in- 
heritance preserved it from any need of external 
exploitation. It wanted nothing from the outside 
world except labor and credit to develop its enor- 
mous potentialities, and it was quite content to leave 
the competitive Imperialisms of Europe to appro- 
priate the wildernesses of Africa, extend their do- 
minions over Asia and occupy the islands of the 



THE NEW WORLD ii 

jsea. In these circumstances the European system 
(grew in unchallenged prestige and power. Apart 
/ from the incipient Imperialism of Japan it had no 
(competitor outside itself; and as the vacant terri- 
tories of the earth became developed, Europe reaped 
the harvest in increasing prosperity, which was re- 
flected in the accumulation of wealth, vast industrial 
expansion, and the growth of competitive arma- 
ments. In this general prosperity most of the 
nations had their share, but the chief beneficiaries 
were the six great military states which held the 
European structure together on the insecure basis 
of organized hostilities called the Balance of Power. 
With the war the structure collapsed, and today 
continental Europe is a political and economic ruin. 
Of the six great Imperialist Powers three have 
ceased to exist in any recognizable form. All have 
been swept by revolution and are plunged in poverty 
and misery. The ramshackle Empire of Austria- 
Hungary has fallen to fragments; and though 
Germany and Russia have in them indestructible 
qualities which assure their ultimate revival, their 
power is in abeyance. In so far as it exists, it exists 
only to complete the destruction of the old European 
system, and can play no effective part in the imme- 
diate task of world reconstruction. And while the 
war has wrecked the defeated Powers, it has not 



12 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

strengthened the victorious Powers. The extent of 
the impoverishment is has wrought in France and 
Italy is only temporarily concealed by the continu- 
ance of the Alliance and by the artificial conditions 
of credit and commerce that prevail. For practical 
purposes the continental system has ceased to exist. 
Its recovery will be a matter of years, perhaps of 
generations, and in the interval other Powers will 
have the main responsibility for making the chan- 
nels into which the new world will flow. 

Those Powers are Great Britain and the United 
States. Both have been engaged in the war, but, 
thanks to their inherent conditions rather than to 
any intrinsic virtues of their own, they have escaped 
relatively unharmed, and indeed — especially in the 
case of the United States — with enhanced power. 
They have escaped because they were not a part of 
the continental system. The source of Great Brit- 
ain's strength was as a world Power, and the source 
of the strength of the United States was as the 
dominant nation of a continent wholly untouched 
by the material and political devastations of war. 
Powerful among equals before that event, they are 
today and must be^ for a long time to come the 
supreme arbiters in the world's affairs. They have 
the world at their feet. It will be what they choose 
to make it. Between them they rule, directly or 



THE NEW WORLD 13 

\mdirectly, not much less than half the earth. They 
Icommand practically the whole of the credit left in 
/the world. Their supremacy in mere terms of force 
is unassailable. Their command of the sea is not 
merely complete : it is without the shadow of a chal- 
lenge. They have the unequalled potentiality of 
great armies. They possess the major part of the 
raw materials of the general life — wool, cotton, coal, 
iron, food. They represent, both mentally and 
physically, the highest standard of human efficiency 
i extant. They possess the two greatest power-houses 
in the world. There is no other nation that approxi- 
mates to their industrial capacity, and (as the war 
has shown) it is industrial capacity more even than 
numbers in the field that is the determining factor 
in modern warfare. Above all, the power of these 
two great Commonwealths is realized power. It is 
not power (as in the case of Russia) which is latent 
and may be developed in a generation or generations. 
It is in being, actual, instant. It dominates the globe. 
/ And it is not an extravagance to say that the 
/capital problem of mankind is whether this domina- 
j tion is to be exercised in rivalry or in agreement, 
V in friendship or in hostility, for the well-being of the 
world or for the selfish aggrandizement of the re- 
, spective nations. Neither country can escape this 
challenge to its good sense and good-will even if it 



14 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

desired to do so. For good or evil, with or without 
its own volition, the United States is now irrevoca- 
bly involved in the web of the world's affairs. It 
cannot help itself. The doctrine of isolation became 
for ever obsolete on the day that the United States 
entered the war, and the attempt to breathe new life 
into it is as futile as it would be for us to attempt 
to restore the Heptarchy. It has gone, not because 
it was not a sound doctrine in the past, nor because 
it would not be a desirable policy now, but because 
the war has shown that it is not compatible with the 
conditions of the modern world. There can never 
be any water-tight compartments again, not even 
though the compartment is a continent encompassed 
by oceans as wide as the Pacific and the Atlantic. 
The world is henceforth a unit. It may be a unit 
of order or a unit of anarchy, but its solidarity is 
fixed and unalterable and the United States is an 
integral part of the system. And it is equally im- 
possible for us to evade the new conditions. Ger- 
many has passed out of our sky as a menace. We 
no longer look across the North Sea with disquiet 
at the activities of Kiel and Hamburg, Bremen and 
Stettin. Indeed, in all the Continent there is no 
cause of national anxiety left, however much cause 
there may be for alarm in the general dissolution 
that is In progress. For an equal with whom our 



THE NEW WORLD 15 

power and resources can alone be measured we look 
henceforth across the Atlantic to the great nation 
that speaks our language and that has now swum 
into the orbit of our affairs. The mutual relations 
of these two great bodies are a matter of momentous 
concern not only to them, but to the whole world 
system on which their attractions and repulsions are 
destined to exercise a predominant influence. It is 
for this reason that the spirit of Anglo-American 
relations may be said to be the chief secular issue of 
the future. 



CHAPTER II 

A CENTURY OF PEACE 

An incidental result of the outbreak of the Great 
War of 19 14 was that the preparations on both 
sides of the Atlantic for the celebration of the 
Centenary of the Treaty of Ghent had to be aban- 
doned. It had been intended to make the occasion 
an imposing demonstration of Anglo-American 
friendship and to knit that friendship into still 
more enduring shape as a memorial of the com- 
mon gratitude for the blessings of a hundred years 
of peace. The idea had made a powerful appeal 
to all people of goodwill in both countries, and 
the purchase of Sulgrave Manor, the ancestral 
home of Washington, as a memorial of a century 
of reconciliation had given the movement the right 
inspiration by associating the two countries in the 
common heritage of Washington's illustrious mem- 
ory. It was hope^ that the celebration would do 
much to give a more positive character to the 
friendship by removing what Lord Grey of Fallo- 
don has described as the chief obstacles to Anglo- 
16 



A CENTURY OF PEACE 17 

American relations. "There is no solid ground 
for disagreement between this country and Amer- 
ica," he said in a speech at Bedford College last 
July, "and I asked when in America what were the 
chief obstacles to a thorough understanding be- 
tween the two countries. One of the most interesting 
replies given to me was from an American uni- 
versity woman. 'I think,' she said, 'that the two 
chief obstacles are — in England ignorance of the 
United States, and in the United States miscon- 
ception of England.' " The cure for ignorance is 
knowledge, and the cure for misconception is truth. 
The commemoration of the Centenary of the 
Treaty of Ghent seemed to furnish an unrivaled 
opportunity for applying the cures, and among the 
consequences of the war few are more regrettable 
than that the opportunity was lost. 

It was not, it is true, a century of dove-like 
"billing and cooing" that would have been com- 
memorated. If it had been that it would hardly 
have called for celebration, since perfect amity is its 
own sufficient comment. It is because the century 
of peace was won in the face of constant menace 
and friction that it is so rich in the lessons of 
statesmanship and in encouragement for the future. 
The general spirit of the relations of the two 
countries between 18 15-19 15 has been admirably 



1 8 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

stated by Brougham Villiers in his study of the 
critical period of 1 86 1-5. Generally, he says, it 
appears largely a record of unwise, even mischiev- 
ous speaking and thinking, but on the whole of 
rational and honorable doing; of two peoples 
vehemently conscious of each other's shortcomings, 
and never very guarded in the expression of their 
disapproval or resentment, yet fundamentally so 
very much at one in their outlook and ideas that 
though only perhaps towards the close of the 
period they attained to cordiality, yet they never 
actually came to strife. Between the United States 
and ourselves have been waged some of the most 
reckless and offensive verbal battles in history; 
while the same nations, as soon as they have come 
to grips with any question, have repeatedly come 
to a fair-minded and sensible agreement on the 
subject, and have afterwards kept it with an in- 
variable loyalty worthy of all praise. Of the 
differences between the English-speaking peoples 
it may fairly be said that as long as they are half 
understood they produce the maximum of friction; 
as soon as they are fully understood they produce 
no friction at all. 

In this record of violent speech and wise action, 
neither country can claim all the merit of the one 
nor disclaim all the discredit of the other. Honors 



A CENTURY OF PEACE 19 

and dishonors are alike pretty equally divided. In 
his book, A Straight Deal, Mr. Owen Wister tends 
to give the balance of credit to this country and 
the balance of discredit to his own, and it is true 
( that there has been more positive and declamatory 
hostility to this country in the United States than 
there has been towards the United States in our 
own. This is due primarily to the fact that we 
: have filled a much larger space in the canvas of 
I events to America than America has to us. Our 
\ preoccupations have been with the Continent and 
the continental system, whereas the external affairs 
of America have brought it into contact with this 
•country more than with any other Power. During 
the past century France, Russia, and Germany have 
j in turn been the clouds upon our horizon, and the 
issues with America have never been of more than 
secondary and even remote concern. But apart 
from the newly developed distrust of Japan there 
has been hardly any matter of first-rate interna- 
tional concern to America which has not had rela- 
tion to British policy and interests. In practical 
politics the British Empire has covered pretty well 
the whole field of foreign affairs for the United 
States, and this fact, taken in conjunction with the 
historic, temperamental, and other considerations 
that will be discussed later, explains the exceptional 



20 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

acerbity of tone which, as Mr, Wister shows, has 
often marked the controversial temper of America 
towards England. 

But, putting aside the question of tone and tem- 
per, the achievements of the two English-speakinr 
Commonwealths in the pacific solution of their 
difficulties during the past hundred years present 
an example quite without parallel in the relations 
of any two countries of similar magnitude, high 
spirit, and national consciousness. Since the Treaty 
of Ghent there have been eight or ten occasions 
on which the two nations have been brought into 
sharp conflict or subjected to severe tests to their 
wisdom and mutual good-feeling, and on every 
occasion the result has been a triumph for reason- 
able counsels and judicial processes. After the 
preliminary explosion of much fiery feeling the air 
has cooled and the statesmen of the two countries 
have set about finding a sensible and friendly 
solution of their problems. 

It was so in the first case that arose, that of 
the Maine boundary question in 1843, which in- 
volved some 12,000 square miles of territory and 
which, after much heated controversy, was amica- 
bly settled by arbitration at the suggestion of Great 
Britain. In the following year the Californian 
boundary question aroused intense bitterness in 



A CENTURY OF PEACE 21 

the United States, which gave place to a temper 
of compromise that removed all grounds of dis- 
agreement. In the case of Nicaragua, Great 
Britain very wisely and justly yielded its rights 
under the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty in deference to 
the strong and reasonable national sentiment of 
(the American people. Under the Treaty both 
I countries had contracted to build and own the 
Isthmian Canal, but when the United States sought 
to annul the Treaty Great Britain agreed, subse- 
quently surrendering even the stipulation that the 
canal should be unfortified and subject to the 
principle of the open door. 
' Much the most serious and sustained menace to 
the pacific relations of the two countries came with 
the Civil War. In this case the weight of the 
indictment, apart from the singular incident at the 
beginning in which Mr. Seward, the American 
Foreign Secretary, played so indefensible a role, 
rests on this country. There are few chapters in 
our history on which we are entitled to look back 
with less satisfaction than the record of our deal- 
ings with America in the first years of the War. 
And this in spite of the fact that popular senti- 
ment in England, and especially in Lancashire, 
never played a more generous part. But it was 
a long time before that popular sympathy became 



22 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

dominant In policy. So far as the spirit of the 
country was reflected In action and utterance and 
In the Press, It was the hostility of society and the 
governing classes which was apparent to the North. 
It would not be just to assume from this that the 
Intellectual and wealthy classes In England were 
In favor of slavery. They were not. But though 
the slavery issue was the sole cause of the strug- 
gle the fact was not so clearly visible to the con- 
temporary judgment in Britain as It is today. 
It was masked by the secession issue. The rival 
interests of the North and the South caused both 
to disguise or at least to blur the real issue. The 
South did so because they knew that their "peculiar 
Institution" of slav^ery did not furnish a ground on 
which they could hope to win the active sympathy 
of nations to whom slavery was an unthinkable and 
unholy practice. The North did so because they 
did not enter the war with the Idea of abolishing 
slavery, but in order to prevent its extension to 
territories outside those In which It already ex- 
isted. It Is true that before his election Lincoln 
had made his famous declaration that no nation 
could continue "half slave and half free," but his 
own general attitude was more exactly represented 
in his statement that he looked for abolition to be 
a long process, perhaps occupying a hundred years. 



A CENTURY OF PEACE 23 

He would not permit extension, but apart from 
that he was concerned to avoid disruption rather 
than to secure abolition, and it was not until his 
proclamation of emancipation in the midst of the 
war that the true issue was presented nakedly p 
unequivocally to the outside world. 

In these circumstances British opinion in the 
early stages was governed by consideration that 
I had little to do with slavery. The sympathies of 
' aristocratic and governing England were with the 
South because the South represented their own 
-stock and their own traditions. The colonization 
of the South had been carried out in the spirit of 
the old landed aristocracy, and like appealed to 
like across the Atlantic. All the hostility which 
a privileged and monarchical society entertained 
towards the Republic was directed against the in- 
dustrial democratic North whose foundations were 
laid by the Puritan migration of 1620. Conserva- 
tive England had never reconciled itself to the 
Republic, and the breach between the two elements 
in the United States seemed to offer what the con- 
temporary Times called the opportunity of prick- 
ing "the bubble of the Republic." In short, it was 
hostility to the Union and not support of slavery 
that made all the powerful influences in English 
Society take the side of the South and inspired 



24 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

what Cobden called "the diabolical tone of the 
Times and the Post.'' It is not difficult today to 
see how fatal would have been the results had 
the wishes of the clubmen and politicians of Eng- 
land been gratified. The United States would have 
been converted into two rival nations and two 
armed camps; Canada would have had to arm too 
or become absorbed in the Northern Union, and 
there would have been no united America to come 
to the help of Great Britain and France at the 
most critical stage of the Great War. 

The gravest incident of this anxious time was the 
launching of the Alabama from Laird's Shipyard 
at Liverpool. There was never any real doubt as 
to the purpose and destination of this famous ves- 
sel, and Charles Francis Adams, the United States 
Minister in London, gave the Foreign Office the 
completest depositions and evidence on the subject. 
At the eleventh hour Lord Russell decided to de- 
tain her, but a singular accident defeated the in- 
tention. New evidence, on which Lord Russell 
proposed to act, was submitted to Sir John Har- 
ding, the Queen's advocate. What followed is told 
in the life of Charts Francis Adams: 

"He (Sir John Harding) just then broke down 
from nervous tension and thereafter became hope- 



A CENTURY OF PEACE 25 

lessly insane. His wife, anxious to conceal from 
the world knowledge of her husband's condition, 
allowed the package to lie undisturbed on his desk 
for three days — days which entailed the destruc- 
tion of the American merchant marine; and it was 
on the first of these days, Saturday, July 26, 1862, 
that Captain Bullock (the Confederate Agent who 
had ordered the ship) at Liverpool 'received in- 
formation from a private but most reliable source 
that it would not be safe to leave the ship at Liv- 
erpool another forty-eight hours.' On the following 
Monday accordingly the Alabama, alias the '290,' 
alias the Enrica, was taken out of dock and under 
pretense of making an additional trial trip steamed, 
dressed in flags, down the Mersey, with a small 
party of guests on board. It is needless to say 
that she did not return. The party of guests was 
brought back on a tug, and the Enrica, now fully 
manned, was on the 31st off the north coast of 
Ireland, headed seawards in heavy weather." 

/ This was the severest blow struck at the cause 

of the North from any external source. The 

American mercantile marine was destroyed by a 

ship built in a British yard, and manned by British 

i seamen whose achievements were openly applauded 

• in the British press and by British passengers who 



26 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

hailed it with cheers as they passed it at sea. Even 
the patience and wisdom of Lincoln could not have 
prevented so flagrant and disastrous a breach of 
neutrality issuing in a declaration of war if the 
circumstances of the moment had not been too 
heavy to admit of action. Happily the popular 
current in England, as the war developed and its 
true character appeared, served to modify the 
effect of the crime; and when, later, the South 
sought to repeat the Alabama success by secretly 
commissioning two ironclad rams at the Liverpool 
yard, Lord Russell intervened. An order detain- 
ing the suspect ships was issued and shortly after- 
wards they were seized by the Government. But 
the affair of the Alabama remained a menacing 
cloud on the horizon after the war was over. It 
was dispersed by the proposal of the Gladstone 
Administration to arbitrate, and the Geneva Con- 
vention awarded £3,000,000 damages to the United 
States. 

The next incident, that of the Behring Sea, in 
1887, saw the United States as flagrantly in error 
as we had been in 1862. The seizure of Canadian 
ships, sixty miles from land, was a clear breach of 
the law of the sea, and the attitude of the United 
States in the earlier negotiations was highly provo- 
cative. But once more reason and good sense pre- 



A CENTURY OF PEACE 27 

vailed. Arbitration was proposed by this country, 
the United States agreed, and the judgment went 
in our favor both in the matter of damages and 
the issue out of which the incident arose. Again, 
in the first Venezuelan affair, in 1895, it will not 
be denied that the attitude of the United States 
w^as unreasonable. Venezuela, a notoriously cor- 
rupt State, took British prisoners on what we 
claimed to be British Guiana soil, and, when we 
took action, appealed to the United States Gov- 
ernment for protection. President Cleveland's 
Secretary of State, Mr. Olney, demanded "in 
accordance with the Monroe doctrine" that the 
question of the disputed territory should be sub- 
mitted to arbitration. The right to dictate how 
one country should settle a disagreement with an- 
)other was a questionable extension of the Monroe 
(doctrine, but in the end the Salisbury Government 
(wisely agreed to arbitrate and once more the clouds 
(were dispersed. In the second Venezuelan inci- 
dent, that of 1902, the honors were wholly with 
America, The joint demonstration of the British 
and German Governments against Venezuela was 
superficially little more than a debt-collecting af- 
fair, but behind it there lurked in the mind of the 
Kaiser the idea of challenging the Monroe doc- 
trine. The United States met the challenge both 



28 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

wisely and firmly, and, the British Government 
responding with equal reasonableness, the trouble 
passed over. 

It will be seen from this brief record that the 
century of peace has been sufficiently charged with 
alarms and possibilities of conflict as to make its 
achievement remarkable, and to justify the claim 
that history furnishes no parallel for so long and 
consistently successful an unraveling and settlement 
of difficulties between two great nations. They 
may claim to have set up in the world a new 
doctrine of international adjudication, the doctrine 
of the civil settlement of every form of disagree- 
ment. They have used high words in the heat of 
the moment, but they have never come within the 
danger zone of war and have invariably settled 
down in a business-like way to find a just and 
pacific path out of their difficulties. And though 
the admirable efforts of President Taft and Sir 
Edward Grey in 19 12 to reduce this century of 
practice to law and to frame an ironclad scheme 
of perpetual peace between the two countries failed 
at the time, it bore fruit when the war broke out 
in a Treaty which,^ if not ironclad, goes far to 
accomplish the end they had in view. 



CHAPTER III 



THE TWO PEOPLES 



If we looked only at the positive events of the 
century of peace it might be assumed that Anglo- 
American relations were established on so firm a 
footing that the future could be taken for granted. 
This is, unfortunately, not the case. It is, per- 
versely enough, less the case today than it was 
before the war which, for the first time in history, 
made the two English-speaking Commonwealths 
comrades in arms against a common enemy. There 
has throughout been a startling disagreement be- 
tween action and temper. Wisdom has prevailed, 
but the positive spirit of friendliness has been 
lacking. We have been like two men who have 
acted righteously towards each other, but grudg- 
, mgly and snarlingly. We have done well without, 
! apparently, wishing well. Our works have been 
' better than our will. In the end the better mind 
in the two countries has always prevailed, but it 
is the worse mind which has hetn most clamant 
and most audible, and if the future relations of 
29 



30 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

the two countries are to be happy, the better mind 
on both sides must be so organized and strength- 
ened as to resist all the blows of circumstance and 
all the gusts of passion. We both have our incen- 
diaries who act and react on each other, and the 
task for reasonable minds in both countries is to 
make our fire-engines so efficient that we can keep 
the activities of the incendiaries under and reduce 
the combustible material upon which they work. 
Some of the causes of discord are ineradicable, but 
most of them are removable by wise action and 
many of them are the product of misunderstanding 
which will yield to frank discussion or are the 
result of old memories which ought to be decently 
buried. 

Let us look at these old memories first. They 
endure on both sides of the Atlantic, and if they 
are more noisy on the American side it is for the 
reason already given, that our external preoccupa- 
tions have been with the Continent, while those of 
the United States have been primarily with our- 
selves. That will not be the case in future. With 
the disappearance of the one really formidable 
Continental power and the emergence of the Unite ' 
States as our only possible rival in world leader- 
ship, a new situation is created. It is a situation 
that may be turned to good or evil. We can go 



THE TWO PEOPLES 31 

forward together and In harmony, or we can go 
forward separately and in discord. The issue is 
in our hands, and upon our worthiness to deal with 
it the well-being of human society depends more 
than on any other factor in the world's affairs. 

In nursing the memories of the past it may be 
said that our offense has been passive while that 
of America has been active. It has assumed in our 
case the spirit of a resentful parent, who has seen 
a younger member of the family break away from 
his paternalism, throw off his authority and trad- 
tions and establish himself in the world on another 
pattern of ideas. The fact that he has succeeded 
has not modified the parental resentment. On 
the contrary it has aggravated it. The conserva- 
tive mind of England has never quite forgiven 
the American Revolution. It might have achieved 
forgiveness if the Americans had adopted a mon- 
archical form of government, but the choice of 
republicanism kept the resentment alive with a 
permanent motive. The divinity of kingship has 
long been intellectually repudiated even in the most 
reactionary circles, but attachment to the mon- 
archic idea is still deep-rooted and there is a latent 
if unexpressed conviction, fortified by vague mem- 
ories of the French Revolution, that republicanism 
is allied with the powers of darkness, the denial 



32 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

of religion, and the abolition of the rights of prop- 
erty. That conviction continues even though the 
pecuharly conventional morality of America and 
the excessive reverence for property which per- 
vades both America and France make it absurd. 
It will continue, no doubt, in face of the fact that 
half the nations of the world have now become 
republican. Moreover, there has persisted in the 
same obscurantist quarters a feeling that ultimately 
the United States, no matter what happened, really 
in the sight of Heaven owed some measure of 
obedience and loyalty to us. This has led to a 
certain minatory and austere attitude, a certain 
accent of authority and superiority, which have 
added a subtle poison to our intercourse. And in 
particular situations of delicacy and difficulty, nota- 
bly the Civil War, it has broken out into positive 
hostility to the republic as such. The dominant 
influences in England did not care twopence about 
the rights and wrongs of secession; but they did 
care a great deal about the Union, and the pros- 
pect of its disruption appealed to all the obscure 
antagonisms associated with the foundation and 
growth of the republic. 

We are bound, out of respect for historic truth 
and in order to clear the ground, to make this 
confession; but it is happily only one side, and I 



THE TWO PEOPLES 33 

believe the lesser side, of the truth. Even In the 
Revolution Itself the best mind of England was 
wholly In sympathy with the rebel farmers of New 
England. It was recognized that they were fight- 
ing the battle of English liberty against a wholly 
alien spirit of despotism in London, and the 
speeches of Burke and Chatham live as Immortal 
records of the fact. It Is certainly open to doubt 
whether such formidable and unequivocal support 
to an enemy as Burke's speeches constituted — and 
still more his great message to the rebels them- 
selves, the greatest state paper In history according 
to Lord Acton — would have been unpunished in the 
recent war with Germany. Burke would almost 
certainly have been Indicted as a traitor for suc- 
coring the enemy. The fact that he could take 
such an attitude with safety is evidence of the 
weight of public opinion that was behind him in 
his assaults upon a stupid monarch and a corrupt 
and unrepresentative Parliament. And in the case 
of the Civil War popular opinion never shared 
the bat-eyed hostility of the fashionable world, 
and there are few Incidents of which we as a 
nation are entitled to be more proud than the 
heroic fortitude of the Lancashire cotton spinners 
and weavers whose starvation only Intensified their 
devotion to the cause of the North. 



34 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

Nor is it true, on the whole, that our statesman- 
ship has acted from the point of view of the 
powerful irreconcilable forces of the country. It 
is not too much to claim that the Monroe doctrine 
itself emanated from an English statesman in cir- 
cumstances supremely creditable to us. The crude 
view that that instrument was forged to keep 
European kings and especially British kings away 
from the Western hemisphere will not stand on 
examination. The Monroe doctrine was a reply to 
the infamous Holy Alliance which consisted of the 
monarchs of Prussia, Russia, Austria, and France, 
but of which the British king was not a member. 
It had been formed in 1815 by the Czar of Russia, 
the King of Prussia, and the Emperor of Austria. 
In 1820 the Czar sent an invitation to the United 
States to join, and the invitation was declined by 
John Quincy Adams in a dispatch in which he said: 
"To stand in firm and cautious independence of 
all entanglements in the European system has been 
a cardinal point of their (the United States) policy 
under every administration." The real nature of 
the so-called Holy Alliance was then made ap- 
parent by a protbcol signed at Troppau and by 
the Treaty of Verona, by the first article of which 
the contracting Powers, being convinced that the 
system of representative government is "as incom- 



THE TWO PEOPLES 35 

patible with the monarchical principle as the maxim 
of the sovereignty of the people with the divine 
right, engaged mutually in the most solemn manner 
to use all their efforts to put an end to the system 
of representative government in whatever country 
it may exist in Europe, and to prevent its being in- 
troduced into those countries where it is not yet 
known." 

The spearhead of this great testament of mon- 
archism was directed less against Europe, which 
was then well under heel, than against the South 
American peoples then struggling for their free- 
dom. It was directed also against the United 
States, and it was Canning, the British Prime 
Minister, who drew the attention of Richard Rush, 
the American Minister in London, to the meaning 
of the threat. Rush communicated Canning's warn- 
ing to President Monroe, who consulted the aged 
Thomas Jefferson, the ex-President, who drafted 
the Declaration of Independence. In his reply 
Jefferson used these remarkable words : "The ques- 
tion presented by the letter you have sent me is 
the most momentous which has been offered to my 
contemplation since that of Independence. . . . 
One nation most of all could disturb us. She now 
offers to lead, aid, and accompany us. . . . With 
her on our side we need not fear the whole world. 



36 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

With her, then, we should most seriously cherish a 
cordial friendship, and nothing would tend more 
to unite our affections than to be fighting once 
more side by side in the same cause." 

From this incident emerged the famous doctrine 
of the function of the United States to preserve 
the inviolability of all American soil. It emerged, 
not out of hostility to this country, but with its 

,warm approval — an approval crowned by the bene- 
diction of the last of the Great Fathers of the 

Irepublic. And no unbiased American opinion to- 
day denies that during the century that has elapsed 
since the doctrine was laid down, its main security 
has been the sea-power of Great Britain. Without 
the open or tacit sanction of that power no chal- 
lenge to the authority of the doctrine from any 
external quarter was possible, and it was this con- 
sideration that stood in the path of the ambition 
of the last German Kaiser to extend his Empire 

I in the South American Continent. In any fair 
discussion of the historic attitude of Great Britain 
to the United States a weighty entry on the credit 

I side is due in respect, not merely of the origin 
and endorsement l^y Britain of the Monroe doc- 

I trine, but of the practical guarantee given to it by 
the existence of British sea-power. 

There are other memories which may fairly be 



THE TWO PEOPLES 37 

recalled as a set-off to the heavy account of the 
Revolution and the Civil War. The far-reaching 
ambitions of Napoleon included not only India, but 
the North American Continent, and it was the 
British Fleet which stood between him and the 
foundation of an overseas dominion in Louisiana, 
just as a hundred years later it stood between the 
German Kaiser and his hopes of extending his 
Empire to South America. It was in this con- 
nection that Jefferson wrote in 1802 that "the day 
France takes possession of New Orleans we must 
marry ourselves to the British Fleet and nation." 
There was no need for the marriage then, for the 
existence of the British Fleet was enough, but it 
is significant that Jefferson, so soon after the Rev- 
olution, could turn with such confidence to the idea 
of an understanding with England. And the ac- 
tion of England during the Spanish War was no 
less friendly and beneficial to the United States. 
The Continental Powers were almost unanimously 
hostile to America — Germany, France, and Austria 
sought to organize a European league in the in- 
terests of Spain. Great Britain was essential to 
the design, and Great Britain firmly and emphati- 
cally declined to have any part in the proposal; 
not only so, but the refusal to allow the Spani<?'^ 
Fleet to coal at Port Said — a refusal dictated by 



38 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

the interpretation of the status of neutrality — had 
a not unimportant bearing on the course of the 
war. 

If there has been little recognition of this in- 
debtedness in the United States in the past, the 
fact is due to what Mr. Owen Wister calls the 
"anti-British complex" which has persisted from 
revolutionary days, and has been stereotyped by 
the biased presentation of history and reinvigor- 
ated by circumstances which will be dealt with 
in other connections. Mr. Wister contrasts this 
anti-British complex with the "pro-French com- 
plex" which has paralleled and completed it. Un- 
der the influence of these currents every wrong 
that England has done to America has been studi- 
ously remembered, while every act of friendship 
has been studiously ignored. Precisely the oppo- 
site tendency has prevailed in the case of France. 
"Several times France has been flagrantly hostile 
to us," says Mr. Wister. "But there was Lafay- 
ette, there was Rochambeau, and the great service 
France did us then against England. Hence from 
our school histories we have a pro-French complex. 
Under its workings we automatically remember 
every good turn France has done us and automat- 
ically forget the evil turns." It is probably true 
that no country in history ever earned so handsome 



THE TWO PEOPLES 39 

a dividend from a single investment as France has 
done by her support of the American Revolution. 
No one will begrudge her this good fortune, but 
it is pertinent to remember that the action of the 
French king was not motived by affection for the 
Americans, but by hostility to the English, and 
that he himself lamented what he had done, "I 
was dragged into that unhappy affair of America," 
he said later, "advantage was taken of my youth." 
And the nimbus that hangs about the head of La- 
fayette in America is not very visible to those 
who are familiar with his later unfortunate activ- 
ities in the French Revolution. 

The romantic affection for France became a 
tradition which was invulnerable to circumstance. 
It survived even the open antagonism of Napoleon 
III during the Civil War. He seized the oppor- 
tunity offered by the preoccupations of the North 
to make the only serious attack ever delivered on 
the Monroe doctrine. With the tacit consent of 
the South, which was prepared to pay any price 
for European support, he placed the unfortunate 
Maximilian on the throne of Mexico and so seemed 
to have succeeded where his great namesake had 
failed. In return he was unremitting in his efforts 
to serve the cause of the South. "All through the 
summer of 1862," says C. F. Adams in his biog- 



40 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

raphy of his father, the American Minister in 
London, "the Ministers of Napoleon III were 
pressing the British Government towards recogni- 
tion" (of the South) ; and though the story of the 
Jlabama provides a sufficiently black mark against 
England, it is at least paralleled by the action 
of the French Government which gave a license to 
a French firm to build four armored ships, two 
smaller ships, and a gunboat, under cover of a 
statement that they were "destined by a foreign 
shipper to ply the Chinese and Pacific seas between 
China, Japan, and San Francisco."" It was only 
after the Laird rams had been seized by the Brit- 
ish Government that Napoleon III became dis- 
creet, and we find Mason, the Confederate agent 
in England, writing home sadly that "the conviction 
has been forced upon us that there remains no 
chance or hope of getting ships from either Eng- 
land or France. . . . From England we have long 
since had nothing to expect; from France we have 
the right to entertain a belief of other result s.'* 
It was not until the end of 1863, when the issue 
of the war was no longer in doubt, that Napoleon 
III definitely renounced his hopes of securing the 
consent of the British Government to a breach of 
neutrality in the interests of the South. Without 
the co-operation of the British Fleet it was im- 



THE TWO PEOPLES 41 

1 possible for him to act, and it is clear beyond any 
j shadow of doubt that but for the attitude of the 
I British Government he would have intervened in 
the war. This fact does not rest upon surmise, 
but on the documentary evidence of the principals. 
Slidell, the Southern agent in Paris, records that 
in the interview of the pro-South Englishman, 
W. S. Lindsay, with the Emperor, Napoleon III 
said "he would long since have declared the in- 
efficiency of the blockade and taken steps to put 
an end to it, but that he could not obtain the 
concurrence of the English Ministry and that he 
had been, and was still, unwilling to act without it. 
That M. Thouvenel had twice addressed to the 
British Government, through the Ambassador at 
i London, representations to that effect, but that no 
definite response had been elicited." And the in- 
terview with Lindsay was granted, on the Em- 
peror's own admission, in the hope that he would 
be a channel through which he could once more 
approach the British Government with a view to 
prompt and decisive action which was take the 
shape of the dispatch of a joint fleet to the mouth 
of the Mississippi. 

It is relevant to recall these facts, not in order 
to prejudice the French nation in the American 
mind, but to show, in the light of the naked facts 



42 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

of the past, how irrational is the historic anti- 
British bias by comparison with the pro-French 
bias. It is generally assumed that that anti-British 
bias is chiefly the result of a mischievous tendency 
in education, and an investigation of the school 
histories in popular use in the past gives strong 
confirmation of the view. They have taken a defi- 
nitely prejudiced attitude in regard to the facts of 
history, and have, as has been repeatedly shown 
by American writers, carefully excluded those as- 
pects of the conflict which were calculated to modify 
American opinion of British conduct and feeling. 
This use of perverted history in order to canalize 
national sentiment in a given direction, which was 
carried to such scientific lengths in Germany by 
Treitschke and his school, is a vice from which the 
English educational practice has been tolerably free. 
The kindred vice of exalting our own actions and 
slurring over our own misdeeds and failures has 
been common enough, but it cannot be charged 
against us that our schools have been used to 
create a hostile frame of mind in regard to any 
particular nation. 

At the same time, there are abundant lacunae in 
our knowledge that account for much of the failure 
to appreciate American feeling. When I was be- 



THE TWO PEOPLES 43 

ing shown over the White House at Washington 
recently I was told how a British Ambassador, 
now dead, on visiting the residence of the Presi- 
dents, asked why the wood of the structure, obvi- 
ously beautiful, had been covered with white paint. 
He was informed that about a hundred years ago 
there had been an unfortunate fire there, and the 
charred timbers had had to be painted — hence the 
White House. In his innocence he pressed for 
details, and he learned to his discomfiture that the 
"unfortunate fire" was caused by a raid of British 
marines in the war of 1 812-14. He was ignorant 
of the fact and I was no less ignorant. To the 
English mind the war of 18 12-14 is a very negli- 
gible affair in the large perspective of the Napo- 
leonic era. It was an affair in regard to which 
impartial American opinion today admits that we 
were not primarily culpable and that it was a prod- 
uct of the Anglophobe Francophil tendency which 
was more natural and excusable within a genera- 
tion or so of the Revolution than it is in the twen- 
tieth century. But it is well to remember that 
while we are ignorant of the reason for the White 
House being the White House, the American 
schoolboy in the past has not been allowed to be 
ignorant. He has been kept excessively conscious 



44 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

of the cause. The fact that we had twice waged 
war on American soil was at the root of his patri- 
otic teaching, and it takes a long time to get a 
reminiscence like that out of the blood of a race. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE AMERICAN MIND 



It Is, however, not only a truer and more gener- 
ous Interpretation of history on both sides that Is 
necessary to the growth of good-will. The disease 
Is deeper than dead memories. It Is In living 
tendencies and temperamental Irritants. The Amer- 
ican university woman, referred to by Lord Grey, 
defined them broadly as Ignorance of the United 
States on our part and misconception of England 
on theirs. With the latter It Is not my function 
here to deal. There are happily plenty of en- 
lightened American writers who are combating that 
misconception In Its various aspects. We can leave 
them to remove the mote (or beam) out of their 
own eye, while we attend to the beam (or mote) 
In our own. The charge of Ignorance leveled 
against us does not admit of denial. All we can 
advance in mitigation of the fact is that we are a 
European country involved in the European web 
and that we have been compelled to take America 
for granted. We have felt we could take it for 
45 



46 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

i granted, because, in our innocence, we have as- 
sumed that, in spite of the periodical naggings and 
tail-twistings, and in spite of the Revolution and 
the Republic, the United States was really Eng- 
land under another name. It was colonized from 
this country; it spoke our language, shared our 
traditions, our customs, and our literature, had 
much the same spiritual tendencies, and quite the 
same commercial morality and more than our own 
practical energy. If it was not part of the British 
Commonwealth in law, it was a part of it in virtue 
of bonds more enduring and sacred than law. The 
marriage, it seemed, was made in heaven and no 
revolution could dissolve its spiritual contracts. In 
this comfortable conviction, it was assumed that 
we as the senior were entitled to correct our off- 
spring, chasten its deficiencies, give it good advice, 
and receive in return implicit and grateful obedi- 
i ence. We did not understand that Americans do 
jnot want to be regarded as Englishmen under an- 
I other name, but as Americans sans phrase. We 
were naively convinced that the greatest compli- 
ment an American could have was to be accepted 
as an Englishman. Any one, of course, would like 
to be an Englishman if he could, and the idea that 
there were people speaking the English tongue who 
resented being taken for Englishmen in disguise 



THE AMERICAN MIND 47 

approximated to blasphemy. This paternal or 
grandpaternal view is at the root of much of the 
mischief between the two countries. 

The first fact for us really to drill into our 
minds is that the Americans are a foreign people 
and hate above everything the arrogant assump- 
tion so common in our tone and attitude that they 
are really ourselves in a rather cruder stage of 
development. Even in the main current of the 
nation, which is profoundly pro-English, this re- 
sentment exists. By the main current, I do not 
mean the majority. I mean the most influential 
thought, the most educated opinion, the most in- 
digenous culture. You will fin'd among certain 
elements of American life a tenderness of affection 
for this country as surprising as it is moving. 
And this not only in a city that retains so much 
of the authentic English atmosphere as Boston 
does, but in remote places. Off the beaten track, 
as in Kentucky, you may find yourself in a social 
atmosphere more reminiscent of England than Eng- 
land itself. It is only there that I have seemed 
to see Jane Austen's serene England in being, not 
as a social cult or as an affectation, but as a frame 
of mind and a deep-rooted habit of life. And 
among the intellectuals the enthusiasm for England 
is, I should say, overwhelmingly predominant. I 



48 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

saw much in a recent visit to America of the rep- 
resentative men of the universities, both the old 
universities like Harvard, and the modern univer- 
sities like Chicago; and better and wiser friends 
of England I do not hope to see — friends who 
know our faults as well as our virtues, and feel 
our mistakes as acutely as if they were their own. 
This current is our great asset in America. It 
rests with us not only to keep it, but to extend it, 
and make it dominant over American popular 
sentiment. That sentiment in the main is neither 
pro-English nor anti-English, though there are 
large "pockets" of definite hostility. For the most 
part it is indifferent, shot through with threads 
of friendship here and hostility there. How could 
it be otherwise? The popular English conception 
of America as a sort of member of the family 
who emigrated and became rebellious a century and 
a half or so ago is a fatal misapprehension of 
realities. It was true a century ago and partially 
true half a century ago : it is wildly untrue today. 
The United States is a great foreign country, in- 
finitely vaster, more populous, more rich than this, 
with an independent life, and a civilization widely 
differentiated from ours, a confusion of tongues and 
races welded into a rough whole. When a war an- 
nouncement was made in Chicago, I am told, it was 



THE AMERICAN MIND 49 

placarded In forty-seven languages and dialects. 
New York has a larger Italian population than 
Rome, and a larger aggregation of Jews than any- 
city on earth. It is a great Polish city, a great Ger- 
man city, a great Russian city. You may walk along 
business thoroughfares on the east side where you 
will never see an English name on the shop fronts. 
There are more Negroes there than in any other 
city, the second largest aggregation of Negroes 
being In Chicago. In motoring from Boston to 
Cape Cod I stayed in Plymouth and found the 
very Mecca of English Puritanism mainly occupied 
by Polish artisans. About Cape Cod itself the 
labor is largely Portuguese from the Azores. The 
textile industries of Massachusetts and Rhode 
Island are run by Italian, Irish, Polish, and French- 
Canadian labor — all of It, be it observed, of Cath- 
olic sympathies. And Buffalo, Detroit, Toledo, 
Cleveland, Chicago, and the other cities that have 
sprung up like magic by the highway of the Great 
Lakes to the West are as diverse In their pop- 
ulations as the Eastern cities and farther removed 
from the original English Influence that lies, nev- 
ertheless, at the core of American institutions and 
thought. And farther West the popular aloofness 
from that original thought is almost complete. In 
so far as there Is any acute external preoccupation 



50 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

it is directed not so much to Europe as westward 
to the Pacific and Japan. There has never been 
such a fusion of such diverse races on so vast a 
scale in history, and out of that fusion a type is 
emerging which, English in speech, largely Eng- 
lish in blood, and mainly English in custom, is 
nevertheless so various in source and inspiration 
as to be not merely foreign, but in some senses the 
most foreign thing of all, for it is an amalgam 
of all the foreignnesses on earth. How swiftly 
it is shaped in the mould that this tumultuous 
mixture is insensibly creating is illustrated by an 
incident which Mr. Gay, formerly Dean of the 
Faculty of Commerce at Harvard and now editor 
of the Evening Post (the JJ^estminster Gazette of 
New York), told me. "When I was a boy in 
Toledo," he said, "the Polish immigration was in 
progress, and in our city the Poles formed a com- 
munity so organized, nationalistic, and self-con- 
scious that it seemed a fixed and permanent feature 
of the city's life. It had its own newspapers, its 
own churches, and preserved its own speech. It 
was a pure Polish enclave. When I went back 
years later I had occasion to call in a decorator. 
The workman sent '^was a nice young fellow and 
a typical American in speech and thought. His 
name was Stephens. I talked with him and found 



THE AMERICAN MIND 51 

that he was a Pole, born in Poland, who had come 
in that tide of immigration twenty years before. 
So far from preserving his Polish character, he 
had become entirely absorbed in the American 
stream, and even his name, Stevanowski, had been 
Anglicized, because, as he disclosed to me, he had 
fallen in love with an Irish girl, and she would 
not marry him until he had a more native-sounding 
name." 

That incident illustrates the ease and rapidity 
with which America resolves its racial material 
into a common currency. It illustrates also the 
stratification of the material. The tides of immi- 
gration have followed each other with extraordi- 
nary definition, and the last comers have always 
taken the lowliest tasks. The 100 per cent. Amer- 
ican — if, outside the aboriginal Red Indian there 
can be said to be such a phenomenon — has largely 
ceased to labor. The heavy work has been taken 
over in turn by the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, 
the Greeks, and so on, as one invasion has fol- 
lowed another. The great shoe-blacking industry, 
for example — so important a feature of American 
life — after having been in the hands of the Irish, 
then of the Negroes, then of the Italians, then 
of the Poles, is now being done by the Greeks. 
And the Greeks in some places, Seattle for in- 



52 TMI-; ANGLO-AMKRICAN I UIUKE 

I stance, are now, I read, j^iving place to the Turks. 
The miracle is that out of such an unprecedented 
mixture of constituents assembled in so brief a 
space of time there should have developed a wide- 
spread community so homogeneous in character, 
speech, and even physical qualities. \hc miracle 
has an important bearing on the problem of the 
permanence of racial characters, but under no other 
existing political and social system than that es- 
tablished by the founders of the Republic could it 
have been accomplished. It is the triumph of those 
ideas of human equality and free institutions which 
lay at the root of the American system. 

But the sudden emergence of this vast national- 
ism of the New World out of the overflowings 
from the diverse nationalisms of the Old World 
has produced a frame of mind with which we have 
to take account. It is the source of that acute 
national sensitiveness, that emphasis upon "Amer- 
icanism," wiiich plays so large a part in public 
affairs. The old county family which has been 
established in the country-side for centuries can 
afford to be indifferent about trifles that cut the 
newcomer to the quick. His social nerve-ends are 
a little bare; his self-consciousness a little excessive, 
and he tends to see disrespect and scorn too readily. 
1 suppose at least two-thirds of the population of 



THE AMERICAN MIND 53 

n the United States are either foreign-born or of 
^>i/i immediate foreign ancestry. This fact, so far from 
making them indifferent to their nationality, makes 
them feverishly sensible of it. They want, quite 
honestly, to be accepted as good Americans, and 
the novelty of their situation lends a fervor to their 
"Americanism" which can only mellow with time. 
From this cause comes that spirit of correctness 
and convention that strikes the visitor to the coun- 
try as much as the abounding hospitality and kind- 
liness of the people. The common European view 
of the American as a hustling and boastful person 
is found to be singularly wide of the mark. He is, 
on the contrary, cordial, quiet in speech and man- 
ner, and curiously modest in bearing. He takes 
criticism very well, and has an obvious and un- 
affected respect for the judgments of the older civ- 
ilizations in matters touching the mind. With this 
is coupled a certain precision of social conduct that 
is much more reminiscent of the England of two 
generations ago than of the England of today. 
And that precision is paralleled in political affairs 
by a respect for convention that amounts almost 
to a religion and easily becomes a vice. 

The result is seen in the strange paradox that 
while the United States is in thought the most in- 
dividualistic of modern states, it is more subject 



54 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

in political action to the impulse of the herd-mind 
than perhaps any people in history. Tolerant and 
mild in its personal relations, it can be extraordi- 
narily intolerant in its collective manifestations. 
"America," as Mr. P. W. Wilson said in a witty 
phrase, "is the land of liberty — liberty to keep in 
step." It may be doubtful of what "American- 
ism" means in certain emergencies, but when it has 
made up its mind it moves with the unity and 
momentum of a herd of bison, and woe to the 
dissident who crosses its path. This spirit of sub- 
ordination to the common impulse — the spirit of 
a nationalism at once intense, youthful, and unsure 
of itself — has had many remarkable illustrations 
in recent years, illustrations both admirable and 
ugly. It was the key to the astonishing voluntary 
self-denial practiced during the war. The word 
went out that Americanism demanded that the peo- 
ple should forego the use of wheaten bread, and 
the order was obeyed without a murmur. It was 
declared to be unpatriotic to use petrol for pleas- 
ure, and on Sunday not a motor was visible in 
Fifth Avenue. Money was required for the war, 
and in the remotest corner of the United States 
the committee of citizens assessed how much each 
man ought to contribute to the loan, and he con- 
tributed it or paid the penalty in broken windows 



THE AMERICAN MIND 55 

and public opprobrium. Such a tyranny, not of 
law, but of public opinion, is without precedent in 
European experience. It does not always work 
for worthy ends. It can be exercised in a spirit 
as hostile to the authentic temper and tradition of 
"Americanism" as any Czarist system. That was 
so in the case of the frantic explosion against 
"Radicalism" last winter, the record of which may 
be read in the crushing exposure of its outrages, 
abuses, and follies contained in the memorandum 
of indignant protest signed by a group of the most 
distinguished jurists in the United States. 



CHAPTER V 



THE ENGLISH MANNER 



It Is often said, I think with much truth, that 
the American mind respects English opinion, but Is 
resentful of the English manner. The two facts 
are Intelligible enough. What I have called the 
romantic attachment of Americans to France was, 
until the war, sufficiently removed from practical 
affairs to preserve the freshness of a first and 
immortal love. The Americans adored France as 
Don Quixote adored the peerless Dulclnea, be- 
cause she was a creature of the mind unbesmlrched 
by the contacts of earth. The saying that the 
good American when he dies goes to Paris em- 
bodies the feeling with humorous truth. The dif- 
ference of language, so far from interfering with 
the affection, served to envelop it in an agreeable 
strangeness. It is generally assumed that commu- 
nity of speech is an aid to mutual understanding 
and friendship. That ought certainly to be the 
case, but it may be seriously doubted whether 
Anglo-American relations have not lost more than 
56 



THE ENGLISH MANNER 57 

they have gained from the common medium of 
intercourse and the ease with which verbal brick- 
bats can be exchanged across the Atlantic between 
the journahstic firebrands on both sides. But there 
is another and much more fundamental reason why 
the French have been more successful in winning 
the good-will of Americans than the English. They 
have as much natural egoism as any people on 
earth, but in their methods of intercourse they have 
more subtlety and delicacy, more tact and sensitive- 
ness to the feelings of others than the English 
have. 

The point may be illustrated by an incident of 
which I was a personal witness in a great Amer- 
ican city. I had been invited to speak at a dinner 
of leading citizens, some of them the heads of 
businesses of world-wide fame. The other guests 
were to be the British Consul and the French 
Consul. The British Consul did not appear, and 
the chairman read from him a bald intimation of 
the fact that he had another engagement. There 
was no expression of regret, no wish that the gath- 
ering would be a pleasant one — nothing but the 
brusque announcement of the fact that he had 
something else to do. Nothing was said publicly, 
but it was as though a contemptuous insult had 
been flung at the audience. The French Consul, 



58 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

who was sitting beside me, turned and raised his 
eyebrows significantly. "It might have been done 
more tactfully," he said. "And yet," he went on, 
"he is a good fellow, and does not mean to hurt." 
He had hurt, not the sensibilities of the audience 
only, but still more gravely the country he repre- 
sented. And while he did not mean to do harm, 
his offense sprang ultimately from that intolerable 
air of superiority which the Englishman of a cer- 
tain type, and, not seldom, of our public-school 
tradition, affects towards other peoples. The spirit 
of caste pride which he has learned at home in the 
social sphere he carries with him abroad into the 
racial sphere. He himself is often unconscious of 
what he does. Like the British Consul "he is a 
good fellow and does not mean to hurt." But the 
spiritual pride is so ingrained that he is unaware 
both of it and of its reactions upon others. In a 
remarkable article on "The Roots of Anti-Briti^' 
Feeling" which appeared recently in an American 
journal, Mr. Harold Stearns, one of the libernl 
school of American publicists, deals with this sub- 
ject: 

"The Englishman's feeling that other nations 
really don't count is, of course, far less strong in 
its manifestation towards us than towards any 



THE ENGLISH MANNER 59 

other foreigner. But it is replaced by an uncon- 
scious snobbery, which is perhaps worse; it is, at 
any rate, more exasperating. No one who has 
ever traveled on a British steamship going, let us 
say, to Cape Town can have failed to observe the 
subtle line of social demarcation between the Eng- 
lishman and the Colonial. It crops up in the most 
unexpected ways, but it is always there, and the 
Colonial is made to feel very definitely that he is 
an inferior. The Englishman assumes his supe- 
riority as naturally as he assumes the fact of the 
British Empire. Similarly in his attitude towards 
Americans the average Englishman assumes, prob- 
ably unconsciously, that we are still Colonials, 
rather capricious Colonials to be sure, and with 
peculiar, amusing ways of our own, but still Colo- 
nials. America has hardly become a definite na- 
tional entity in his consciousness; we do not quite 
literally exist as a rival nation or as an important 
factor in the world. We both speak the same lan- 
guage; we have the same traditions and laws and 
civilization; we are of one color and blood; we 
are all Anglo-Saxons — and is it not an Anglo- 
Saxon world? The Englishman regards an alli- 
ance with us, at all events common action with us, 
as perfectly natural, if not indeed inevitable — with 
\ England doing the directing. I shall not stretch 



6o THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

this point, because Americans understand it only 
too well; it would make us angry if it did not make 
us laugh. After all, Englishmen are hardly to be 
blamed for not seeing the point. Our own snobs 
with money have flattered them to the top of their 
bent. Yet nationally we are of the mood of Mar' 
Twain when he wrote 'A Connecticut Yankee' ; it 
is still true that we regard ourselves as the salt of 
the earth. And while I do not seek to pass judg- 
ment on these respective claims to superiority, I 
may perhaps point out that no genuine Anglo- 
American entente cordiale can come into existence 
until England has accepted the fact of America. It 
is because I for one want that acceptance to come 
without the bloody intrusion of war, and because 
so many of my own friends are Englishmen, that 
I commend to the liberal Englishman's attention 
these unpalatable truths." 

This is severe, and it may be in some respects 
unjust; but it is essentially true, it comes from 
a friendly pen, and it very faithfully represents 
the feeling latent in the minds of thousands of 
Americans who, so far from wishing to be hostile 
to us, are profoundly concerned to remove the 
causes of hostility. It is necessary for Englishmen 
to realize that America is a foreign nation, as proud 



THE ENGLISH MANNER 6i 

of its history and achievements as we are proud 
of ours, perfectly conscious of the place which its 
resources give it in the world, and whose doctrine 
of equality makes it peculiarly resentful of the 
superior or condescending airs of other peoples, 
especially of peoples whose traditions of caste they 
have discarded. There are plenty of vices in the 
American civilization, but there are two vices from 
which it is conspicuously free. It is free from 
snobbery on the one hand and from flunkeyism 
on the other. These are weeds of the Old World 
that will never grow in that soil. If the rich 
American desires them he has to come for them 
to this country, where peerages can still be bought 
and flunkeyism still enjoyed. But nothing is wider 
of the truth than the naive view so prevalent in this 
country that America envies our social discrimina- 
tions and is conscious of inferiority because it does 
not enjoy them. "Those English cousins of ours 
will be the death of me," said a writer in a New 
York monthly magazine recently. "They are in- 
corrigible. I had an overwhelming experience with 
one of them the other day. He was a delightful 
person and we got on together famously. The 
talk turned to the purchase of Sulgrave Manor, the 
old home of the Washington family in England, 
as an international shrine. My friend told me that 



62 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

he had lately visited the place. 'What especially 
impressed me,' he said, 'was the sight of the ar- 
morial bearings of the Washington family carved 
in a great oak beam in the old dining-hall. There 
in those stars and stripes I saw for the first time 
the origin of our flag, "old glorious" as you call it. 
And now,' he added impressively, 'whenever I see 
the American flag flying I realize that it represents 
the ideals of an English country gentleman' !" 

The sensible American laughs at these childlike 
expressions of our national mind, but he has quite 
other feelings when the expression assumes the 
grotesque ofiicial stupidity of offering the K.C.B. 
to distinguished Americans like J. W. Gerard and 
General Pershing. That so gauche an affront to 
American institutions and ideas should be possible 
is an evidence of the profound misunderstanding 
of those institutions and ideas that prevails in re- 
sponsible quarters in this country. It implies that 
Americans are flattered by our titles, when the 
keynote of their whole system is the repudiation 
of them as antiquated follies and the sentiment 
that men shall be valued as men and not as the 
wearers of ribbons that any climber can win by 
skilful touting. 

From this fundamental note of human equality 
comes that ease and accessibility which are such 



THE ENGLISH MANNER 63 

noticeable qualities of the American. There is — 
to employ words I have used elsewhere — no ice 
to break before you get at him. There is no baf- 
fling atmosphere of doubt and hesitancy to get 
through; no fencing necessary to find out on what 
social footing you are to stand. You are on him 
at once — or rather he is on you. He comes out 
into the open, without reserves of manner, and 
talks "right ahead" with the candor and ease of 
a man who is at home in the world and at home 
with you. He is free alike from intellectual prig- 
gishness and social aloofness. He is just a plain 
man talking to a plain man on equal terms. It 
is the manner of the New World and of a demo- 
cratic society in which the Chief of the State is 
plain Mr. President, who may be the ruler of a 
continent this year and may go back to his business 
as a private citizen next year. It is illustrated 
by the tribute which Frederick Douglass, the Ne- 
gro preacher, paid to Lincoln. "He treated me 
as a man," said Douglass after his visit to the 
President. "He did not let me feel for a moment 
that there was any difference in the color of our 
skins." It is a fine testimony, but I do not suppose 
I that Lincoln had to make any effort to achieve such 
^ a triumph of good manners. He treated Douglass 
as a man and an equal because he was a man and 



64 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

an equal, and because the difference in the color 
of their skins had no more to do with their essen- 
tial relationship than the difference in the color of 
their ties or the shape of their boots. The direct- 
ness and naturalness of the American manner give 
the sense of a man who is born free — free from 
the irritating restraints, embarrassments, and arti- 
ficialities of a society in which social caste and 
feudal considerations prevail as they still prevail 
in most European countries. Our stiffness and 
aloofness are due to the absence of this primal 
freedom of intercourse. We are uncertain about 
each other — not about each other as human be- 
ings, but about each other's social status. We 
have got the spirit of feudalism still in our bones, 
and our public-school system, our titles, and our 
established-church system all tend to keep it alive, 
all work to cut up society into social orders which 
are a survival from the days before democracy. 

And much of the anti-British feeling in America 
is due to the fact that we carry our feudalism 
abroad where it is neither understood nor appre- 
ciated. We succeed in giving the impression that 
we are the superior branch of the family visiting 
a poor relation, who says "cant" where we say 
"cahnt" and "gotten" where we say "got," and 
perfectly inexcusable things like that. It often hap- 



THE ENGLISH MANNER 65 

pens, as Lowell showed long ago, that these ap- 
parent departures from decorum are sound English 
which we have dropped and the Americans have 
retained. It is so with "gotten," which was used 
by so recent and reputable an English writer as 
Anthony Trollope. But the point is that we ought 
to remember that the American practice in speech 
as in other matters is not necessarily inferior to 
our own because it differs from ours. On this 
subject Mr. Wister quotes an amusing dialogue : 

"Why do you call your luggage baggage?" asks 
the Englishman. 

"Why do you call your baggage luggage?" re- 
plies the American. 

"Why don't you say treacle?" 

"Because we call it molasses." 

"How absurd to speak of a car when you mean 
a carriage!" 

"We don't mean a carriage; we mean a car." 

And in another connection he records the case 
of an Englishman who turned up at a dinner party, 
to which he had been invited, in a tweed suit. Like 
the British Consul, again, he probably "meant no 
harm," but it bore the construction so common in 
regard to the English manner in America that 
anything is good enough for the inferior branch 
of the family. In this case it was suitably rebuked: 



66 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

"Oh, I see you haven't your dress suit with you," 
said the host. "The man will take you upstairs. 
One of mine will fit you. We'll wait." There 
is a formality and correctness of behavior among 
Americans which Is acutely outraged by the ap- 
pearance of disrespect on the part of foreigners. 
It is felt not so much as a personal slight as a 
slight to their civilization, and must be referred 
to those considerations on which stress has already 
been laid. The point was expressed to me very 
simply, but effectively, by a lady in the Middle 
West (who, by the way, was proud of her Cornish 
origin). Speaking of some local feeling in regard 
to the casual and thoughtless action of a distin- 
guished visitor at a gathering in his honor, she 
said, "You see, we are a new people and we are 
a little sensitive in matters touching our self-resp' 
— especially where visitors from older countries 
are concerned." 

It is unfortunate that, under the conditions of 
our diplomatic service, which limit the supply of 
men to a narrow and extremely conservative circle 
of wealthy and officially minded persons, we have 
rarely sent to Washington to represent us men 
who understand and ""sympathize with the American 
Idea or appreciate American institutions. During 
the war many of the official visitors to the country 



THE ENGLISH MANNER 67 

did us no good service, and the tour of one no- 
torious gentleman has become a legend which no 
English visitor to America today will fail to hear 
about. In the past America has sent to London 
to represent it a succession of its most notable 
citizens, men of intellect, character, and distin- 
guished public service, like Charles F. Adams, 
Russell Lowell, John Hay, J. H. Choate, W. H. 
Page, and the recent able and eloquent repre- 
sentative, Mr. J. W. Davis. With the exception 
of Lord Bryce, whom the Americans still charac- 
teristically call Mr. Bryce and the memory of 
whose tenure of office is preserved with singular 
affection, we have usually sent to Washington men 
trained in the vicious atmosphere of European 
diplomacy, limited, formal persons, ignorant of the 
American spirit and often contemptuous of that 
spirit if they were not ignorant. No graver wrong 
than this can be done to Anglo-American relations. 
The measure of the wrong can be appreciated 
from the remarkable and salutary influence which 
Lord Bryce's term of service had on American 
feeling. It can be confidently said that nothing 
in recent years has done anything like so much 
to improve the relations of the two countries, and 
it is regrettable that that admirable departure was 
not pursued. The American people have a deep 



68 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

and sincere reverence for intellect and character, 
and respond more readily perhaps than any other 
nation to the compliment implied in sending to them 
the best we have to represent us. We need in 
Washington, not Foreign Office officials, but great 
Englishmen who understand America, love it, and 
sympathize with its culture and ideas. 

In estimating the influences that hav^e to be 
reckoned with in this connection, account must be 
taken of the American woman. In spite of the 
enormous infusion of foreign elements, the pre- 
vailing moral sentiment of America is distinctly 
Puritan. In the spiritual sense it is not more Puri- 
tan than England — perhaps not so much. The 
religious motive is singularly attenuated. Few of 
the churches in New York, for example, are open 
for service more than once on Sundays, and a dis- 
tinguished pastor said to me that he had come to 
the conclusion that music was the only contact with 
spiritual things that the American retained. But 
while materialism has overwhelmed the religious 
motive, it is materialism strongly permeated with 
moral ideas. The gospel of personal fitnesss, of 
becoming social cowduct, of cleanliness and so- 
briety, is enforced with the passion of a religion. 
In this respect Mrs. Eddy, with her Science of 
Health, is one of the most representative products 



THE ENGLISH MANNER 69 

of the country, and the extraordinary success of 
her movement reflects accurately the national spirit 
and ideals. From this moral motive has come, 
very largely, the phenomenon of Prohibition. Other 
factors have contributed to its success — the Negro 
question in the South, for example, industrial con- 
siderations in the North, and so on. But the main 
factor has been moral, coupled with the difficulty 
of restraining "the trade" by any legislative enact- 
ments. It is, I believe, true that a large proportion 
of the States "went dry" through "wet" votes — 
that is, through the votes of moderate drinkers 
who had, after repeated experiments, come to the 
conclusion that no terms could be made with the 
drink trade and that it was necessary to sacrifice 
their own habit for the general well-being. It is 
a characteristic illustration of that collective mind, 
working voluntarily and even tyrannically, which 
is so constant a feature of the American spirit. 
When it is fully seized with an idea it stampedes 
with irresistible force and tolerates no obstruction. 
In this moral revolt against alcohol the Ameri- 
can woman has been the dominant influence. And 
her suspicion of England is largely based on the 
drinking customs of the country. Two causes have 
especially operated in our disfavor. In the past, 
the "remittance man" — the ne'er-do-weel, shipped 



70 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

abroad with an allowance — was often the only 
type of Englishman of which she had any knowl- 
edge, and she judged our standards by his. And 
the experience of our drinking customs brought 
back by the American soldiery has confirmed her 
in her disapproval. She has been shocked partic- 
ularly at the revelation of the widespread habit 
of public drinking among women. It represents 
the last term in degeneracy to the mind of a coun- 
try where, even before Prohibition, the spectacle 
of a woman drinking or a barmaid serving in a 
public saloon was practically unknown. 

If in this brief glance at the temperamental and 
other sources of friction between the two peoples 
emphasis has been laid upon the American case 
against us rather than upon our case against the 
Americans, it is not because we have no complaints 
to make, but because, in working for a better com- 
mon understanding and sympathy, it is important 
that we should be sensible of our own infirmities 
rather than theirs. At present the reverse is the 
case. And fortunately there are many able Amer- 
ican pens engaged in telling Americans where they 
fail in their dealings with us. 



CHAPTER VI 



POLITICAL DISCORDS 



In the previous chapters I have dealt with the 
disturbing temperamental aspects of Anglo-Amer- 
ican relations. In giving them first attention I 
have not done so because there are no serious 
practical difficulties, but because I believe such 
difficulties as there are will disappear if we can 
establish the spirit of good-will and good intention 
on both sides. In the speech to which I have 
previously referred Lord Grey said "there is no 
solid ground for disagreement between this country 
and America." That is substantially true, but there 
are abundant grounds for disagreement and worse 
if there is ill-will and bad temper. To understand 
what those grounds are it may be useful to call 
in representative American witnesses themselves. 
The first I shall summon is Mr. William Randolph 
Hearst. In political Intelligence Mr. Hearst re- 
veals a violent, emotional energy unsustained by 
any philosophy of life or government. He is held 
71 



72 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

in low repute intellectually, but he wields a jour- 
nalistic power as great in the North American 
continent as Lord Northcliffe's is in England. He 
owns a series of important morning and evening 
newspapers in many of the great cities from New 
York and Boston in the East to San Francisco in 
the West. On internal affairs his influence is often 
disinterested and public-spirited; on external affairs 
it is that of the common thoughtless jingo journal- 
ist, appealing to any violent emotion that will swav 
the mob. He has one constant motive. It is hos- 
tility to this country. The cause of that hostility 
is obscure, but the explanation generally offered to 
me in America was that it was the result of some 
personal slight, a consideration that governs most 
of his public activities and animosities, as for ex- 
ample in the case of his vendetta against President 
Wilson. In his newspapers on January 24th last, 
Mr. Hearst wrote an article over his own signa- 
ture replying to one I had published in which I hp' 
ventured the opinion that the one serious practical 
obstacle to good relations with the United States 
was the Irish question. Mr. Hearst combated this 
view. "An Englishman," he said, "never sees any- 
thing but what he wants to see, and Mr. Gardiner 
has been wholly unable to see the real cause of the 
attitude of Americans towards England." He then 



POLITICAL DISCORDS 73 

proceeded to tell his readers what are the causes 
of that attitude. I shall endeavor to summarize 
them fairly. The endeavor will not occupy much 
space, for Mr. Hearst's indictment consisted mainly 
of a whirl of violent words from which it is diffi- 
cult to extract any meaning except that he dislikes 
us. He denies that it is the Irish question that is 
"the basis of America's antipathy to England." 

"It is the American question. 

"It is the self-respect so persistently offended by 
England which they entertain for themselves as a 
people [this sentence is misty; but the meaning is 
tolerably clear]. 

"It is the knowledge of the fact that they saved 
England from total defeat and that this service has 
not even been acknowledged, let alone appreciated. 

"It is resentment of England's affectation of 
lordship over the rest of the world and England's 
arrogant disposition to employ the United States 
as a useful tool for the furtherance of her own 
selfish purposes without regard for the interests 
of the United States 

"It is the feeling that there is no such thing as 
fair friendship with England, no such thing as 
equable association, no such thing as beneficial co- 
operation. It is the increasing understanding of 



74 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

England's purposes and policies and of that domi- 
nant fact in history — that England has endeavored 
to destroy, and always succeeded in destroying, 
every great power that rivalled her in trade, com- 
merce, and industry, and national growth or inter- 
national influence, first Spain, then Holland, then 
France, then Germany. 

"It is ... " 

And so on to the extent of nearly a column of 
general invective. Not until we reach the close 
do we find a specific charge which has any rela- 
vance to practical affairs — 

"It is the conviction that Japan will be the next 
active antagonist of the United States, and that the 
secret treaty which existed between England and 
Japan before the war will be proved to be still in 
existence if ever war shall occur between the United 
States and Japan. 

"Americans do not dislike Englishmen, and they 
do not waut to dislike England. 

"But Americans devotedly lov^e their own coun- 
try and they must necessarily feel a certain antago- 
nism to a nation an'd a government which seem 
continually to endeavor to take advantage of the 
American people and to attempt to undermine the 



POLITICAL DISCORDS 75 

position and the power and the progress of this 
American nation." 

Apart from the reference to Japan, It will be 
seen that Mr. Hearst's indictment is one of gen- 
eral suspicions of our motives which it would be 
profitless to answer. It is intrinsically as unfair 
and mischievous as the similar attacks on the United 
States which Mr. Bottomley periodically indulges 
in. It would be repudiated by intelligent and fair- 
minded opinion in America as emphatically as those 
diatribes are resented by intelligent and fair-minded 
opinion here. But, again like them, it is significant 
of the widespread ignorance and vague hate that 
exist for the exploitation of reckless journalists. 
And at the back of the indictment there lies a real 
antagonism of ideals. That antagonism is stated 
with precision by a writer of a wholly different 
calibre and outlook. In the article to which I have 
already referred, Mr. Harold Stearns traces the 
roots of anti-British feeling in America to Impe- 
rialism. Historically and spiritually the United 
States is opposed to the exploitation of subject 
peoples, and its own circumstances have not 
tempted it to depart from its traditions. The ad- 
venture into Imperialism in the case of the Philip- 
pines, so far from inaugurating a new era, has 



76 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

very effectually checked any spirit of external an- 
nexation that may have existed under the essen- 
tially imperialistic influence of Theodore Roosevelt. 
The idea of self-government is the keynote of the 
American system, and a people indoctrinated with 
this idea is inevitably critical of a system founded 
on the opposite principle of Imperialism. Edu- 
cated American opinion readily admits that the 
record of the United States is not spotless. The 
story of the Mexican war of 1846-7 is sufficiently 
discreditable to check any undue self-esteem, and 
the treatment of the Indian, that native race which 
has succumbed so completely to the invader, is not 
a subject on which they can feel any pride. It 
ought, on the contrary, to chasten their censorious- 
ness in regard to our own record. 

But the broad fact remains that the two systems 
are fundamentally opposed, and it is difficult for 
Englishmen to understand how British Imperialism 
looks to the American mind, or the disastrous ef- 
fects of incidents like Amritsar upon American 
sympathies. Nothing has so aggravated the anti- 
British feeling as the practical results of the Peace 
Treaty, and "the spectacle of England getting 
away with everything that's not tied down." The 
belief that England has done well out of the war 
is at the back of much of the prevailing hostility. 



POLITICAL DISCORDS 77 

There is enough apparent truth in it to serve the 
purposes of the anti-British propagandists. And 
selfish interests no less than abstract idealism are 
offended. "How," it is asked, "can these great 
captains of the American oil industry have felt 
when they read in the same newspaper of England's 
acquiring all the Persian concessions and that the 
United States had been graciously offered the lemon 
of the mandate over Armenia?" 

And there are China and Japan. The future 
of these two countries is one of the capital concerns 
of the world. And in that concern events are un- 
happily tending to put Great Britain and America 
on opposite sides. Nowhere have British policy 
and American policy come into such clear compari- 
son as in the case of China. Our record in regard 
to that country is not good. The story of the 
opium war remains a black page in our annals, our 
commercial and financial operations in China have 
been unaccompanied by any large motive of Chi- 
nese regeneration, and the alliance with Japan has 
made us practical aiders and abetters in that coun- 
try's imperialistic policy towards China. America, 
on the other hand, has an excellent record in regard 
to China. It has a genuine affection for the people, 
which no one who knows them will find difficult to 
understand. The Chinese have come to look upon 



78 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

the Americans as the best friends they have. They 
see in them a people who have no territorial am- 
bitions to serve, who have stood for the integrity 
of the country and for the policy of the open door. 
It was the Americans alone who renounced their 
share of the Boxer indemnity; and among the 
influences that have since the war caused the la- 
mentable reaction in America against permanent 
association with Europe, few have been more 
powerful than the decision of the Paris Conference 
to countenance the aggression of Japan in Shan- 
tung. That incident has aroused little indignation 
in this country, but in America it is accepted as 
typical of the Peace Treaty, and more than any- 
thing stamps that Treaty, for the American mind, 
with the hall-mark of the old unrighteous diplo- 
macy of Imperialism. 

This feeling is, of course, intensified by the dis- 
trust and dislike of Japan that are so prevalent. 
Even in the East this distrust and dislike are imme- 
diately apparent. Two questions are put to the 
English visitor with unfailing regularity. The first 
Is, "Why don't you settle with Ireland?" The 
second Is, "Are you going to continue the Japanese 
Alliance?" As one travels West this preoccupation 
with Japan Increases, and in the Far West It easily 
dominates all other international political considera- 



POLITICAL DISCORDS 79 

tions. The reason is not far to seek. The Chinese 
in America represent no nationalistic or ulterior 
aim, but the Japanese come with the outlook of a 
highly developed and intense nationalism, and 
America justly or unjustly sees in them a menace 
to its civilization. It may seem odd that a country 
which has been the melting-pot of all the nations 
of Europe should be alarmed at the idea of Japa- 
nese immigration. But the white man, no matter 
where he comes from, is easily assimilated, while 
the yellow man remains a race apart with char- 
acters that seem fixed, with a civilization fundamen- 
tally alien from that of the white man, and the 
Americans are sufficiently afflicted with the Negro 
question without wishing to add yellow to their 
color problem. 

And apart from the domestic aspect of the mat- 
ter, which chiefly touches the western seaboard, 
there is the larger shadow over the future of the 
Pacific involved in the imperialistic policy of Japan 
and its undisguised and so far astonishingly suc- 
cessful purpose of securing the control of China as 
.the means of establishing an Asiatic hegemony. 
/^The naval development of Japan clouds the hither- 
! to serene sky of the Pacific, and it is not to be 
i wondered at that Americans, turning eastward and 
seeing the naval supremacy of Great Britain, and 



So THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

turning westward and seeing the sea power of 
Japan, look with concern upon the alliance of the 
two powers, so dissimilar in race, in religion, in 
sympathy, and alike only in pursuit of the Imperial 
idea. The alliance with Japan — an alliance that 
has never commanded the popular approval of the 
English people — may have been defensible when 
Imperialist Russia seemed a menace to our Asiatic 
interests. It is utterly indefensible now that that 
menace has disappeared. Its influence has been 
thoroughly vicious, and it has made us at least a 
consenting party to the ambitions of Japan in China 
and criminally silent about such infamies as those 
practised by Japan in Korea. But the weightiest 
objection to it is the fact that it offers a fatal 
barrier to the establishment of a sound under- 
standing with America. If the League of Nations 
is to become a reality, alliances such as that with 
Japan have no meaning except a sinister one, and 
one of the first steps that a British Government, 
desiring to cleanse the Anglo-American atmosphere, 
must take is the denunciation of an alliance that 
ties our hands in China and is a menace not only 
to the friendship of the English-speaking peoples, 
but to the pacific development of the world. If 
this course is not practicable, there is an alterna- 
tive that is both practical and obvious. The Treaty 



POLITICAL DISCORDS 8i 

is primarily concerned with China. In that Treaty 
China herself is clearly entitled to be included. 
She is at least as much concerned in her own future 
as Japan or Great Britain are. And with China, 
the United States also should be a signatory. The 
legitimate interests of America in the Pacific and 
the development of China are at least as impor- 
tant as our own or those of Japan, and they have 
in them no element of privilege such as that which 
vitiates Anglo-Japanese policy. 

But in spite of Mr. Hearst's assertion, it remains 
true that the gravest source of anti-British feeling 
in America is the Irish question. Indeed, Mr. 
Hearst's own papers prove it. In his crusade 
against England there is no subject he employs so 
insistently as English rule in Ireland. When I was 
in Boston last autumn a whole issue of his paper 
there was devoted to a broadside against England 
on this theme. The reason is simple. Alike to 
our friends and foes in America the Irish question 
is the governing fact of Anglo-American relations. 
In a recent speech in the House of Commons Sir 
Edward Carson, referring to the Irish question, 
said: "Let America mind her own business and 
we will mind ours." Until we realize that the 
Irish question is an American question as much 
as the Negro question is an American question. 



82 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

we shall miss its capital meaning. The idea that 
in this matter the United States is an impertinent 
outsider Interfering in a domestic British quarrel 
is a complete misreading of the situation. The 
United States is concerned about it because it is 
the most vital of its domestic issues. A moment's 
reflection will make this apparent. Of the hundred 
^ ^millions of people composing the nation, the large 
yjj% ^ majority are either foreign born or the children of 
foreign parents. The "loo-per-cent. American" 
of whom we hear so much is a rare bird in the 
land. Of the various broad categories of the popu- 
lation, a tenth is Negro, an eighth is German in 
origin and sympathies, not less than a tenth is 
Irish, and there are in addition large elements of 
Poles, Russians, Italians, Portuguese, Scandina- 
vians, Greeks, and Jews of different nationalities. 
Among these different families that are absorbed 
or being absorbed in the general currency of the 
race, the Irish forms the most solid, coherent, de- 
', tached mass. It alone preserves an imperium in 
\ imperio, alone brings into the American system the 
I antagonisms of the Old World, alone keeps aflame 
_' the passion of "old, unhappy, far-off things." In 
the midst of the" confusion of races, foreigners 
among foreigners, accommodating themselves to a 
icommon life, the Irish alone bring a violent extra- 



POLITICAL DISCORDS 83 

territorial loyalty and a fanatical idea. The loy- 
alty is to Ireland and the idea is revenge upon its 
ancient enemy. 

And in all their political activities these two con- 
siderations govern them. Much more than the 
Germans, who take little part in public affairs and 
are universally regarded as quiet, industrious citi- 
zens, they are the true hyphenated American — the 
Irish-American whose spiritual home is elsewhere 
and to whom the United States is only the stage 
for the secular battle. One man with a conviction, 
said Stuart Mill, is more powerful than ninety-nine 
who have only interests. But the Irish are not 
one in a hundred. They are at least one in ten. 
They move as a vehement stream through the con- 
fused and tumultuous life of the nation. They 
are not the under-dog. They permeate the whole 
structure of society. Their great immigration took 
place two generations ago, and in the interval they 
have established themselves in the seats of the 
mighty. They are powerful in finance, in law, in 
literature, in the services. It was an Irish-AmerI-{i 
can Admiral who was discovered to be the antago- 
nist of Admiral Sims's pro-English enthusiasm. It 
is a judge of the Supreme Court of the State of 
New York, Judge Cohalan, who is the most indus- 
trious, and I must add venomous, assailant of this 



84 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

country in the Press and on the platform. When 
I went to Princeton to see the football match be- 
tween Harvard and Princeton it was a young Irish 
three-quarter back who was the hero of the game. 
The police force is mainly Irish, and, above all, 
the political machine is Irish. The political genius 
of the race has no rival in any other element of 
the community, and there is hardly a great city 
whose caucus is not dominated by the Irish in- 
fluence. If the mayor is not Irish, the party "boss" 
is Irish. No ambitious politician, whether Demo- 
crat or Republican, can afford to ignore so deci- 
sive a factor of success, whether the goal in view 
is the Mayoralty of the city, the Governorship of 
the State, or the Presidency of the Republic. When 
Mr. Hiram Johnson, of San Francisco, appeared 
on the horizon as a possible Presidential candidate 
his first step to forward his prospect was to go to 
Boston and make a violent anti-British speech. It 
was not, probably, because he wanted to make it, 
but because he had to make it as an evidence that 
on the main Irish-American issue "he was right." 
He had to twist the lion's tail to put himself in 
the running. And most of the tail-twisting, political 
and journalistic alike, has its origin in the same 
motive. 

It would be foolish to suppose that the average 



POLITICAL DISCORDS 85 

decent American likes this state of things. He 
hates it. He wants the political atmosphere of his 
country to be cleansed of this poison gas. He 
wants American domestic affairs to be settled on 
wholesome American considerations, and not by 
considerations that have their roots in a couple 
of islands three thousand miles away. And it is 
for this reason that he asks you in tones of almost 
anguished entreaty, "Why don't you settle the 
Irish question?" He is not impertinent; he is 
merely selfish. He is not poking his nose into 
our business, as Sir Edward Carson seems to think: 
he is acutely sensitive about his own business. And 
it is not the pro-Irish who ask the question most 
anxiously: it is the pro-English — those who are 
most eager to get the grit out of the Anglo-Ameri- 
can machine and to set it working smoothly and 
sweetly for the advantage of both countries and 
of the world in general. While the Irish grievance 
continues our friends in America are helpless. On 
the one hand they hate and deplore the virus that 
Irishism introduces into their affairs, great and 
small; on the other hand they can exercise no con- 
trol over the spring from which the virus issues. 
They know that while the Irish disease continues 
it will break out in ugly blotches upon the face of 
America. When the source of the disease is dried 



86 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

up — assuming that it is dried up by the wisdom of 
this country and not in defiance of its obstinate 
hostility — they will know how to deal with its 
sequelae at home. They will then say to the Irish 
quite firmly that they have to decide whether they 
are Irish or Americans, and that collective spirit 
that works so decisively in American affairs will 
do the rest. It is well to remember that the United 
States has inherited its two great troubles from 
England. It was the English slaver that brought 
the Negro to America for his own profit. It was 
English policy that depopulated Ireland and sent 
a nation with bitterness in its heart to poison the 
life of America. We cannot cancel the one mis- 
chief; but we alone can cancel the other. And until 
we do it we can never achieve that English-speaking 
solidarity which is the hope of those who wish 
the world well. 



CHAPTER VII 



SEA POWER 



In the background of the minds of all, whether 
English or Americans, who are concerned about 
the future of Anglo-American relations there lurks 
a shadow at once menacing and hopeful — menac- 
ing as a danger If It Is left unchecked, hopeful as 
a means of such a dramatic act of faith and mutual 
confidence as would strike the Imagination of both 
countries and bring a new spirit Into their Inter- 
course. It Is the shadow of sea power. The im- 
portance. In the past and present unstable structure 
of the world, of sea power to this country needs 
no argument. The British Commonwealth exists 
In virtue of that power. Take It away and it is 
dissolved into Its elements. There are powerful 
Influences in the United States which say that that 
dissolution is desirable and ultimately Inevitable. 
The view Is not limited to the crude anti-British 
propaganda of Mr. Hearst. It Is shared by much 
of the intellectual liberal opinion which, imbued 
with the tradition of the United States, is hostile 
87 



88 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

to Imperialism as the enemy of the self-governing 
development of human society. It is not the British 
Commonwealth that they dislike: it is the British 
Empire. They understand and approve the rela- 
tionship of the mother country and the self-govern- 
ing dominions — Canada, Australia, South Africa. 
They neither understand nor approve Crown Col- 
ony and imperialistic government, and they are 
able to point to the United States' example in Cuba 
and the Philippines as evidence that their country 
does practise what it preaches. "We want to jus- 
tify our civilization," says one of these critics, "but 
we have little desire to extend it by force. We 
want other peoples to agree with us; we don't 
particularly want them to become part of us. Eng- 
lishmen," he proceeds, "ought to undergo a trans- 
valuation of values. What the world needs is 
not the British Empire, but English civilization. 
Far from having nothing to learn from England, 
America, with the rest of the world, has every- 
thing to learn from her — justice, a vivid sense of 
personal and civil rights, the infallible expediency 
of free speech, political good sense, the whole art 
of compromise, sportsmanship, and good taste. 
America can take cafe well enough of the material- 
istic task of seeing that the Anglo-Saxon world 
continues to exist; to England is reserved the more 



SEA POWER 89 

important job of proving that Anglo-Saxon civiliza- 
tion is worth existing." 

There is profound truth in this, and no English 
liberal will regard Imperialism as anything more 
than a means to that end of national self-expres- 
sion and independence which is at the root of his 
political philosophy. But on the other hand no 
English liberal would admit that the British Em- 
pire can be liquidated in a spasm of emotion. It 
might not mean disaster to ourselves; but it would, 
in the present circumstances of the world, certainly 
mean disaster to the subject peoples concerned. 
India, for example, has many grievances against 
the British raj, but it has no desire to substitute 
for it the kind of devastating rule which Japan 
has established in Korea. And while the British 
system, whether as Empire or Commonwealth, 
endures, indeed so long as Great Britain remains 
an island power, security at sea will be its main 
concern. This is not a fact for which we need 
apologize. We cannot help ourselves, for we live 
by the sea. Our antagonisms have always had 
their ultimate root in some menace to that security. 
Bismarck said that hostility between Great Britain 
and Germany was against the nature of things, 
for "the elephant could not fight the whale," and 
for centuries our relations with the German people, 



90 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

even with Prussia, were more secure than those 
with any other great European nation. It was 
only when the elephant resolved to become a whale 
as well as an elephant that the sky darkened and 
the catastrophe came. And now that the German 
whale is dead blubber, lying on the floor of the 
North Sea, British sea power is more unchallenged 
than it has ever been in history. Thoughtless 
people have said that we were unprepared for the 
late war. In reality, as the events showed, we 
were the only people who were prepared for the 
war, for the British Navy was, from the beginning, 
incomparably the most efficient factor in the strug- 
gle. But relatively supreme as the British Navy 
was in 19 14, it is immeasurably more supreme to- 
day when its only serious rival has disappeared. 

That supremacy is not a matter for mere exal- 
tation: it is a matter also for grave reflection. 
British security is one thing; an unchallenged Brit- 
ish hegemony of the seas is quite another. Nothing 
is more certain than that, left to the unregulated 
working of events, that hegemony will not be per- 
manently accepted. The world will not consent 
to live by the sanction of the British Fleet any 
more than it would ct)nsent to live by the sanction 
of the Prussian sword. The idea of a League of 
Nations which leaves the undisputed sovereignty 



SEA POWER 91 

of the sea In the hands of one power is an Idle 
dream, and the great task of statesmanship is to 
reconcile British security with a sovereignty of 
the sea that the general sense of the world accepts. 
The achievement of this supreme task is in the 
hands of the Anglo-American community, and in 
achieving it each has much to gain and nothing to 
lose. In achieving It also they will lay the founda- 
tion stone of a pacific world-structure that will 
survive all the vicissitudes of the future and make 
the League of Nations an impregnable reality. 
In considering what is at stake it is necessary to 
face certain plain unpalatable facts. In the past 
century practically all the grave discords between 
the two countries have arisen in connection with 
the sea. It was so in the case of the war of 18 12- 
14; It was so during the Civil War; and In the 
early stages of the late war the chief obstacle to 
full American sympathy with the cause of the Allies 
was the feeling provoked, especially among the trad- 
ing community, by the rigorous exercise of the right 
of search at sea. Generally speaking, it Is true that 
the United States accepted British sea power with- 
out reserve. It recognized that that power was 
an essential consequence of the European system, 
that It was exercised with moderation and pre- 
served a certain code of law at sea, that its exis- 



92 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

tence was a defensive shield behind which the 
Monroe doctrine could function, and that in its 
absence its own naval problem would assume a 
more serious character. But the war has pro- 
foundly changed the outlook. The German chal- 
lenge has gone, and all the sea power of the 
Continent combined would be hardly more formi- 
dable against the British Navy than a fleet of fishing 
smacks. In all the rest of the world, leaving out 
the United States, there is only one other Navy 
that counts, that of Japan, and Great Britain is 
an ally of Japan. Moreover, the war has shown 
that the invention of the submarine has fundamen- 
tally changed the conditions of sea warfare. It 
organizes anarchy in place of the semblance of 
law that prevailed before, and in that anarchy the 
neutral trader is more certainly doomed than the 
belligerent warship. 

In these circumstances, the United States will 
inevitably be compelled to revise its whole attitude 
on the subject of sea power. It is, in population, 
natural resources, and accumulated wealth, the 
most powerful nation on earth, and it cannot ignore 
the grave responsibilities that rest on it for the 
protection of its national interests. It is committed 
by the Monroe doctrine to the defence of the 
whole American continent, and it has two oceans 



SEA POWER 93 

to police, with the British Navy dominant in the 
one and the Japanese Navy in the other. Its posi- 
tion is complicated by the British possessions, not 
only on the mainland, but still more in the Carrib- 
bean Sea. Obviously, its dependence on the good- 
will of Great Britain, not to speak of Japan, cre- 
ates a situation that a great and proud nation 
cannot permanently accept. It will be compelled, 
If not now, then at some future and not very dis- 
tant time, to provide itself with sufficient guarantees 
for its own defence. It is not difficult to conceive 
a jingo President, ready to sacrifice anything for 
a renewal of power, inflaming the whole continent 
with a naval panic, perhaps against Japan, and 
inaugurating a ship-building programme that will 
seem to challenge the British supremacy at sea. 
We know what would follow — the familiar cry of 
*'two keels to one," the frenzy of the Incendiary 
Press In both countries, the gathering excitement, 
the "incidents" — Morocco, Agadir, Bosnia, and 
the rest under other names — perilously passed, and 
the final "Inevitable" catastrophe. There are 
wicked men and Insane men in both countries who 
would welcome that final catastrophe to civiliza- 
tion. If they are to be defeated, they must be 
defeated now, when the sky Is unclouded and the 
duty Is clear. They can be defeated only in one 



94 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

way, by an ironclad agreement that rules out the 
possibility of a naval competition ever arising be- 
tween the two countries. 

There is happily in our joint records a noble 
inspiration. Within a year of the close of the war 
of i8 12-14 Monroe, the United States Secretary 
of State, wrote as follows to the American Min- 
ister in London : 

"The information you give of orders having 
been issued by the British Government to increase 
its naval force on the lakes is confirmed by intelli- 
gence from that quarter of measures having been 
actually adopted for the purpose. It is evident, if 
each party augments its force there with a view to 
obtaining the ascendancy over the other, that vast 
expense will be incurred and the danger of collision 
augmented in like degree. The President is sin- 
cerely desirous to prevent an evil which it is pre- 
sumed is equally to be deprecated by both Govern- 
ments. He therefore authorizes you to propose to 
the British Government such an arrangement re- 
specting the naval force to be kept on the lakes 
by both Governments as will demonstrate their 
pacific policy and secure their peace. He is willing 
to confine it on each side to a certain moderate 
number of armed vessels, and the smaller the num- 



SEA POWER 95 

ber the more agreeable to him; or to abstain alto- 
gether from an armed force beyond that used for 
the revenue. You will bring this subject under the 
consideration of the British Government imme- 
diately after the receipt of this letter." 

From this proposal sprang that momentous 
agreement known as the Rush-Baget agreement, 
by which the naval force to be maintained by each 
Government on the Great Lakes was limited, on 
Lake Ontario, to one vessel not exceeding one hun- 
dred tons burden and armed with one 1 8-pound 
cannon; on the upper lakes to two vessels of the 
same burden and armament; and on Lake Cham- 
plain to one similar vessel. All other armed ves- 
sels on the lakes were to be forthwith dismantled 
and no other vessels of war were to be then built 
or armed. 

The records of nations will be searched in vain 
for any act so wise, so courageous, or so rich in 
beneficial results. It stands as the crowning 
achievement of the English-speaking peoples in the 
art of statesmanship. In pursuance of it, the 
American-Canadian frontier of nearly four thou- 
sand miles has remained for a century without fort, 
or gun, or warship, or sentry, from end to end. 
And uninterrupted peace has been the fruit of that 



96 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

act of faith and mutual goodwill. In the light of 
this dazzling witness, the monumental lie of the 
war-mongers, Si vis pacem para helium, shrivels to 
dust. Speaking of the achievement, nearly a cen- 
tury afterwards, in the House of Commons at 
Ottawa, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, then Prime Minister 
of Canada, said: 

"If my voice could be heard that far, I would 
presume to say to our American friends : There 
may be a spectacle perhaps nobler yet than that of 
a united continent, a spectacle that would astound 
the world by its novelty and grandeur — the spec- 
tacle of two peoples living in amity side by side 
for a distance of 4,000 miles along a line which 
is hardly visible in many quarters, with no cannon, 
no guns frowning across it, with no fortresses on 
either side, with no armament one against another, 
but living in harmony and mutual confidence, and 
with no other rivalry than that of generous emula- 
tion in the arts of peace. To the Canadian people 
I would say that if it is possible for us to obtain 
such relations between these young and growing 
nations, Canada wiU have rendered to Old Eng- 
land, the Mother of Nations, nay to the whole 
British Empire, a service unequalled in its present 



SEA POWER 97 

effect and still more in its far-reaching conse- 
quence." 

The opportunity has come for an enlarged and 
more splendid affirmation of the sacrament of a 
century ago. If at the end of a war in which we 
had been foes, our forefathers could rise to so 
grand an argument, it ought not to be difficult for 
us today, after a war in which we have been com- 
rades, to follow and better their example. Then 
the lead came from Washington. The circum- 
stances today would dictate that it should come 
from London, and that it should come in the shape 
of a proposal to pool the naval resources of the 
two nations and to dedicate them, not to any selfish 
national interest merely, but to the League of Na- 
tions and the enduring peace of the world. It is 
not necessary to dwell on the material gain of such 
a compact. The present cost of the Navy is suf- 
ficiently oppressive; but it is a trifle compared with 
what would be involved in the unhappy event of 
a competition with a nation so inexhaustibly en- 
dowed as the United States. Nor need we do 
more than hint at the incalculable strain which such 
a competition would put upon the Overseas Do- 
minions, Australia, South Africa, and especially 
Canada. When the issue was between Great Brit- 



98 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

ain and Germany their course was clear: an issue 
between the two English-speaking families would 
be infinitely complex. But the overshadowing con- 
sideration Is the effect which such a compact as 
that suggested would have upon Anglo-American 
relations. It would establish them upon the im- 
pregnable rock of a common faith and a common 
purpose. It would rout the war-mongers of both 
countries finally and irrevocably. And the an- 
nouncement that the Anglo-American peoples had 
taken a step which would make naval war hence- 
forth impossible would strike a deathblow at com- 
petitive armaments generally, stablize the world 
on a peace basis, and turn its face confidently to 
the light. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE FUTURE 

Perhaps the most formidable obstacle to the 
achievement of that good feeling which is the desire 
of the enlightened opinion of both countries is the 
popular tendency to dramatize nations as characters 
in a play. This one is the bold bad baron, and 
that the knightly and chivalrous hero of romance. 
The roles change with circumstances, the bad baron 
of the last generation being the knightly hero of 
this, according as he seems to be with us or against 
us. Since August, 19 14, for example, Russia has 
passed through the whole gamut of the stage. 
Anglo-American relations have suffered much from 
this subjective idealism, and a more prosaic and 
reasonable view of each other is a necessary pre- 
liminary to appreciating the task before us. There 
are two popular ideas of the American. One pic- 
tures him comprehensively as an aggressive person 
who talks through his nose, always carries a six- 
shooter, lives on cocktails and "quick lunches," and 
worships at the shrine of the Almighty Dollar. 
99 



loo THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

The other pictures him, equally comprehensively, 
as a Puritan son of the Pilgrim Fathers, sublimely 
indifferent to persecution, romantically disinterested, 
now breaking the tyranny of kings and now burst- 
ing the bonds of the slave. Both views are equally 
grotesque. There are swashbucklers in America 
and there are still Pilgrim Fathers in America; 
but the mass of the people is like the mass of other 
peoples, infinitely mixed in character and motive, 
good and bad, kindly and unkindly, concerned about 
very commonplace things, struggling, like others, 
for success in life, enjoying, like others, the pleas- 
ures of life, subject, like others, in times of stress 
to waves of collective emotion, capable, perhaps 
more than some, of rising with circumstance to a 
certain elevation of moral purpose and equally 
capable of lapsing from that elevation. 

And the popular American dramatization of our- 
selves is no less misleading. It sees us as the his- 
toric persecutor of the innocent and the helpless, 
a sort of coarse ogre of a fellow, who having been 
whipped by the New England farmers has nursed 
a grudge against America ever since and is filled 
with envy of its independence and prosperity. It 
is not a recognizable likeness. "Rarely, indeed, 
in the history of mankind," wrote Charles Francis 
Adams, the American Minister in London during 



THE FUTURE loi 

the Civil War, "has there been a more creditable 
exhibition of human sympathy, and what is known 
as altruism, than that now witnessed in Lancashire. 
The common folk of England, Lincoln's 'plain 
people,' workless and hungry, felt what the 
wealthier classes refused to believe, that the cause 
at issue in America was the right of a working- 
man to his own share in the results of his toil. 
That cause, they instinctively knew, was somehow 
their cause and they would not betray it. So no 
organized cry went up to break the blockade which, 
while it shut up cotton, was throttling slavery." 
We are entitled to have facts like these, as well 
as the stupidity of George III and Lord North, 
recorded in the American picture of ourselves. 

The first step to a better and more intelligent 
understanding is to tear up these comic valentines 
of each other. We are neither of us ogres or 
saints. We are both quite ordinary, normal com- 
munities of human beings, containing every variety 
of opinion and swayed by every variety of interest. 
In both there are wise elements and unwise, reac- 
tionaries and revolutionaries, liberals and conserva- 
tives, every shade of nationalism and every shade 
of internationalism. Sometimes the wise elements 
in each get the upper hand and sometimes the 
unwise get the upper hand, and the chief task be- 



102 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

fore us is so to organize the better mind of the 
two countries that it shall be permanently and not 
intermittently dominant in their common affairs. 
As a means to this end, it Is necessary to remove 
the specific causes of misunderstanding and antago- 
nism that impede the path to the goal. While these 
causes remain as inflammable material in our midst, 
danger remains. But no less important Is the 
clarifying of the common atmosphere. Given a 
spirit of good temper and goodwill, the practical 
issues will solve themselves. Without that spirit 
their removal will only change the ground of 
discord. 

In approaching the task, it Is well frankly to 
recognize that there are irreconcilable factions on 
both sides which will continue to sow tares. They 
are not formidable in themselves, but they are 
formidable If left to work unchallenged upon the 
great masses of unlnstructed and Indifferent opinion 
which Is negligible in ordinary times, but dangerous 
when public passion takes the reins. Against these 
influences, the forces of goodwill must wage a 
common war. Among these forces the first place 
belongs to the ofl^clal representation of the respec- 
tive countries. Reference has already been made 
to this subject, and it Is enough here to repeat that 
the admirable practice of the United States in send- 



THE FUTURE 103 

ing, not formal officials, but its most distinguished 
citizens to represent it in London should be imi- 
tated by ourselves. "The sure way to make a 
foolish ambassador is to bring him up to it," said 
Coleridge a century ago. "What can an English 
minister abroad really want but an honest and bold 
heart, a love for his country, and the ten com- 
mandments? Your art diplomatic is stuff — no 
truly great man would negotiate upon any such 
shallow principles." Nowhere is this antiquated 
"art diplomatic" so out of place as in our relations 
with the American people, with their community 
of speech and tradition, their deliberate adoption 
of the idea of candid dealing in international affairs, 
and their policy of "open covenants openly arrived 
at." Among the causes of the reaction in the 
United States against Europe since the war few 
have played a more unfortunate part than the 
secret treaties in which we have been involved, and 
before we can put Anglo-American relations on a 
thoroughly sound basis we must discard the arti- 
fices of secret diplomacy In all matters that affect 
directly or collaterally, our intercourse with the 
United States. 

It cannot be too clearly understood, also, that 
anything like official propaganda in the United 
States is a fatal mistake. There was a great deal 



I04 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

of it during the war and it did our cause grave 
mischief, much of which still remains. The Ameri- 
can resents, as we should resent, the idea of an 
external Government carrying on a propaganda 
in his midst, no matter how just the cause may be. 
He likes to feel that he is forming his own opinions, 
and if he finds that that privilege is being inter- 
fered with from outside he is apt to be suspicious 
of everything he hears and hostile to the policy 
that such methods are designed to promote. There 
are few themes on which the Hearst Press is more 
industriously malevolent than English propaganda 
in America during and after the war. The most 
grotesque suggestions of corrupt practices are made 
and the general public have no means of under- 
standing how unjust and malignant they are. But 
the lesson for us is the importance of avoiding in 
all circumstances the appearance of officially or- 
ganizing opinion in America on any political issue. 
What is necessary, and all that is necessary, is 
the freest and fullest possible intercourse and dis- 
cussion between two peoples. We need to devote 
much more attention to each other's point of view 
on subjects of common concern and to talk out 
our minds candidly ^nd openly. There are no 
communities who have so much to gain and so 
little to lose by the frank exchange of ideas carried 



THE FUTURE 105 

on In an atmosphere of toleration, goodwill, and 
self-respect. Much excellent work has been done 
and more should be done in promoting relations 
between the universities and educational institutions 
of the two countries. There is no class in the 
United States who exercise a more wholesome In- 
fluence upon public opinion than the teaching pro- 
fession, and I think it will be agreed by those who 
have had experience on the subject that there is 
no class also which generally takes a more enlight- 
ened and sympathetic view of English affairs and 
English difficulties or more sincerely desires to 
promote good feeling between the two countries. 
The various Anglo-American societies are doing 
much to bring the friendly Influence of the two 
peoples into active co-operation, and the recent 
movement for closer intercourse between the asso- 
ciated chambers of commerce of England and the 
United States is another development of the legiti- 
mate and helpful exchange of ideas. There is one 
field in which much remains to be done. It is the 
important field of labor relationships. Partly ow- 
ing to the fact of distance, and still more, perhaps, 
to the peculiar character of Industrial development 
In the United States, there has not so far been 
anything like that intimacy between the labor com- 
munities of England and America that Is both 



io6 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

natural and desirable. This matter deserves the 
serious attention of the leaders of industrial opin- 
ion in both countries. It ought not to be impossible 
to achieve such an Anglo-i\merican Pact of Labor 
as would furnish an indestructible guarantee against 
any popular stampede of hostile opinion in either 
country. 

In regard to the Press, the main difficulty is on 
the other side of the Atlantic. There is an ele- 
ment of the reactionary Press in this country which 
is rarely cordial to the United States. It cannot 
forget the past and it cannot reconcile itself to 
republicanism. Its insular superiority towards a 
mere colony is aggravated in the case of the United 
States, which, in its unchanging view, is not merely 
a colony, but a rebellious colony and, still worse, 
a successful rebellious colony. It is invariably 
unfriendly to the true movement of the American 
spirit, as in the case of the Civil War, and the 
only distinguished American who has succeeded in 
arousing its enthusiasm was Theodore Roosevelt, 
in whom it saw reflected something of its own 
militarist and imperialist ideals. It could forgive 
America if it took to buccaneering, even though 
that course would irtevitably bring it into collision 
with ourselves; but it cannot reconcile Itself to a 
tradition which seems a standing rebuke to its gos- 



THE FUTURE 107 

pel of Imperialism. Its frame of mind is summed 
up in that phrase of Mr. Churchill's "Pious Amer- 
ica," which expressed the ingrained dislike of the 
aristocratic mind for the democratic institution. 
But while the spirit of this section of the Press 
towards the United States is consistently "distant," 
it is not actively hostile, nor deliberately provoca- 
tive. That role in the English Press is almost 
exclusively confined to the vulgar diatribes of one 
gutter organ. So far as the attitude of the larger 
number of newspapers toward the United States 
is concerned it is both friendly and understanding. 

This is true in the main, also, of the American 
Press. The tone of great newspapers like the 
New York Times, the New York World, the New 
York Evening Post, the Philadelphia Ledger, and 
the Chicago Daily News, and of weekly organs of 
opinion like the New Republic, and the Nation, is 
admirably fair and just, manly, straightforward, 
frankly critical where criticism is called for, but 
always friendly and always inspired by the obvious 
desire to clear the common path of all obstacles to 
a self-respecting and honorable understanding. 

But outside this responsible class of journals, 
which represents the best, and I believe the ulti- 
mately governing mind of America, there is a 
numerous and powerful body of newspapers which 



io8 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

is definitely and actively anti-British. Of these, 
the Hearst newspapers are by far the most for- 
midable, though they by no means exhaust the list. 
The reason for this phenomenon is plain. It is 
in the existence, first, of powerful elements of anti- 
British sentiment in the American population, and 
next in the existence of an enormous mass of in- 
differentism which is ready to be exploited by that 
sentiment. So long as these conditions prevail 
there will be both journalists and politicians who 
will not hesitate to twist the lion's tail in order to 
win votes and stimulate a flagging circulation. The 
reputable American hates these manifestations as 
much as the reputable Englishman hates the coarse 
fulminations of the gutter press I have referred 
to, but he is as helpless against them in the one 
case as we are in the other. And unfortunately he 
knows that they are much more effective in defeat- 
ing his purpose than the negligible vulgarities that 
we have to endure. They are more effective, not 
only because they are more authoritative and im- 
portant, but because they appeal, not to a mere 
vague dislike, but to active and fierce hostilities 
related to definite issues. In a very real sense the 
remedy for the jourrralistic Anglophobia prevalent 
in the United States is in our own hands. The 
settlement of the Irish question alone would go 



THE FUTURE 109 

far to destroy it. The Irish are not merely power- 
ful in themselves. They are the focus of all the 
inflammatory anti-British feeling of the country. 
The removal of this grievance would mean the 
dispersal of the chief centre of disaffection, and 
would leave Mr. Hearst and his like largely bank- 
rupt of explosive material. And if to the settle- 
ment of the Irish question there could be added 
a common policy in the Far East, and, above all, 
a pooling agreement at sea, there would be little 
left that we should have to fear from the activities 
of the anti-British Press. Indeed, those activities, 
in ceasing to be profitable, would cease to be at all. 
The course of events since the war warns us 
against any extravagant confidence in regard to the 
future. No one can see the present tendencies in 
America without concern. The slogan of "America 
first and America only" gathers volume. It has 
delayed if it has not destroyed the effective estab- 
lishment of the League of Nations. It has pro- 
duced the disquieting reaction embodied in the 
Jones Shipping Bill, and it has added venom to the 
atmosphere that envelops questions like oil and 
rival interests in Mexico. The liberal thought of 
both countries, looking back to the high hopes 
that were awakened by the entry of the United 
States into the war, is shadowed by the failure of 



no THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE 

those hopes. The causes of that failure do not 
belong to my subject. Both countries shared in 
them, though history will record that it was from 
the President of the United States that the new 
evangel came, and that it was what Professor 
Gilbert Murray has called the "outbreak of black- 
guardism" in this country in December, 191 8, that 
chiefly dealt that evangel its death-blow. It is fair 
to remember this when we are tempted to attri- 
bute to the withdrawal of the United States from 
the great task to which the President had dedicated 
it the main responsibility for the post-war catas- 
trophe. It gave the reactionary forces in America 
the opportunity they sought. It allied the more 
predatory and selfish motives of "American inter- 
ests" with the finest and most liberal current in 
the national life, which was outraged at the terms 
of the Peace Treaty and saw in the League of 
Nations Covenant only an instrument for the rati- 
fication of an evil policy. But profound though 
the disappointment has been, the faith of liberal 
Europe in the ultimate wisdom of liberal America 
remains. The miracle that we looked for has not 
come to pass. But the tide of American idealism 
will flow again, and in the end the hopes that have 
been disappointed will be fully realized. It is as 
a means to that larger achievement of a world 



THE FUTURE iii 

organized for peace, and not merely for any selfish 
national interest, that the task of reconciling the 
English-speaking peoples presents itself as the 
supreme duty before us. For in that reconciliation, 
accomplished as those who labor for it desire to 
see it accomplished, there will be no menace to any 
people, but the assurance to all that in the peace 
of the English-speaking nations is the enduring 
guarantee of the peace of the world. 



c5^ ^f 72 

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